


Rarely Pure and Never Simple

by thesemovingparts



Series: Rarely Pure and Never Simple [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Adult Peter Parker, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, BAMF Michelle Jones, Canon-Typical Violence, Child In Danger, Established Relationship, F/M, Found Family, Fuck the US Military Complex, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Irondad, Journalist!MJ, Kidnapping, MJ and Tony accidental friendship, MJ learns to ask for help, MJCU - MJ cinematic universe!, POV MJ, POV Peter Parker, POV Tony Stark, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Peter Parker, Sleep Deprivation, Torture, Trauma Recovery, Waterboarding, hurt mj, non-graphic sexual situations, secretary ross is a Bad Guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:13:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27291019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: “Good morning!” she exclaimed faux-cheerfully. “How are you today, Veronica? Have a good healthy breakfast?”“Hands, Jones,” Veronica ordered and Michelle offered up her wrists without really even thinking about it.“What’s on the agenda for today?” Michelle asked. “Tea party? Oh, a movie? What’s the date-- there was this new Ava Duvernay flick coming out in November that I was super excited for--”“You really don’t shut up, huh?” Veronica said flatly, tightening the handcuffs a notch too tight so they dug into the raw, scarred skin of Michelle’s wrists and effectively shut her up with an unconscious whimper through clenched teeth.*OR: Morgan had never been a part of their plan, all they’d wanted was to get their hands on Michelle Jones, investigative reporter who knew a little too much. But the kid had seen their faces, their truck, so the kid wasn’t going anywhere.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & May Parker (Spider-Man), Michelle Jones & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Michelle Jones & Tony Stark, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: Rarely Pure and Never Simple [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2076090
Comments: 166
Kudos: 245





	1. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

**Author's Note:**

> hey, is everything you write essentially the same story with a vaguely different premise? yes! we have fun here
> 
> Some notes for this story: the first chapter is the only one with any depictions of torture, Morgan is held captive but that is the only form of harm she endures, and if there's anything I forgot to tag above feel free to let me know-- I can be a scatterbrained idiot my dudes. 
> 
> I've got all but the last like chapter and a half of this written, so the plan is to post every Monday until it's all done so let's all cross our fingers that that happens. tbh I wanted to wait until I was finished with the whole thing, but I'm distracting myself from the nightmare that this week is sure to be by posting this lmao
> 
> Okay, now into the hurt so we can watch them heal:

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Vegetable,” Morgan said. “Sort of?” 

“So a fruit?” Michelle questioned from where she was sitting criss-crossed at the head of the bed. It was her turn to lean against the pillow while Morgan sat across from her just a few feet away. 

Morgan liked to make sure that most days were Michelle’s turn to get the pillow, especially when her back was acting up like it was now. 

“Yes, fruit,” Morgan made a face at her, all loud, ten-year-old sarcasm. Michelle had tied her hair into twin braids the day before and they were starting to frizz out. 

“Hmm, let me think,” Michelle tapped a finger against her chin in mock consideration. “Is it, perhaps, a strawberry?”

“It’s a strawberry!” Morgan exclaimed, and Michelle could see the put-upon sort of enthusiasm in the way her hands fell heavy into her lap. 

“It’s _always_ a strawberry,” she reprimanded. “You gotta make it tougher, girlie.” 

“I just want to make sure you remember how many strawberries you owe me when we get home,” Morgan said haughtily. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Michelle laughed. “I get it, I owe you-- _shit,”_ she hissed as she moved the wrong way and tugged painfully at her oblique. 

Morgan’s face fell in a familiar way as she sat up on her knees and scooted closer to Michelle on the cot, hands out and ready to help as if she was some sort of first responder instead of a ten-year-old that Michelle had failed to protect. 

“Are you okay?” Morgan asked. “MJ?”

“I’m good, promise,” Michelle put on a brave face and took one of Morgan’s hands in her own. “Just pulled something’s all.” 

Morgan was not appeased by that. 

“I’ll ask for an ice pack,” she said with the sort of determination that made it all that much more difficult to look her in the eye. “Next time they let me make a list-- I’ll ask.”

“You can’t do that,” Michelle shook her head, exhaustion evident. “You know you can’t do that.”

“They can’t just--”

“They can do whatever they want,” Michelle snapped, maybe harsher than she intended, but getting the point across nonetheless because Morgan sat back on her heels. “Mo, I’m sorry, but it’s a miracle they let me come be with you at all and the stuff they bring you--”

“Can’t be stuff to help you, I know,” Morgan grumbled. She was so young, too young to look as tired as she did. 

But there wasn’t a scratch on her, and she wasn’t going hungry, and Michelle was going to hold onto that for as long as they let her. After all, she understood that the lists they let Morgan make, the lists for things like toothpaste and a washcloth and such were just another thing they would take away in order to get Michelle to talk. 

And Michelle knew she’d have to sacrifice those little comforts that Morgan clung to with the hope of a girl who had immeasurable faith in her father. Because Michelle wasn’t going to talk. 

She’d let them kill her before she talked. 

“Hey,” Michelle began, softer now as she pushed a piece of hair behind Morgan’s ear. “How about you ask for a new blanket, yeah? It’s been getting colder. That would be good for the both of us.” 

Morgan lit up ever so slightly at the suggestion. The girl spent too much time around superheroes, Michelle thought, if the urge to be of help to someone could make her eyes brighter even in the dim of that room. 

“A blanket?”

“Yeah,” Michelle nodded, allowing herself to lean back into the wall again, letting it hold her weight. “A nice warm one. That’d be nice, huh?” 

“I’ll ask,” Morgan nodded assuredly to herself. “I’ll ask.”

“Good girl,” Michelle offered a small smile, only to have it falter when she heard the sound of keys rattling at the door. “Corner. Now,” she ordered, suddenly pushing away any bit of softness she’d incurred during the night. 

Morgan stumbled to the corner in that well-practiced, habitual way she’d learned, and Michelle stood as strong as she could right in front of the door, blocking the girl from view as best as she could manage. The room was small enough that it could never work, just a ten-by-ten concrete space in its entirety, taken up mostly by the toilet, sink, and cot at their disposal, but it was the principle of the thing for Michelle. 

She took a deep breath as the locks unhitched with a _one, two, three_ and then the door was swinging open and she dropped her hand from where she’d been unconsciously clutching at the pulled muscle in her side. 

“Good morning!” she exclaimed faux-cheerfully. “How are you today, Veronica? Have a good healthy breakfast?” 

The woman at the door rolled her eyes and pulled a pair of cuffs off of her belt. She had blonde hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck and was wearing black civvies over her US Military issued boots, as if Michelle wouldn’t notice that little discrepancy. 

Michelle didn’t know this woman’s name, so she’d taken to calling her by the name of the girl that had bullied her in elementary school. It felt fitting enough. 

“Hands, Jones,” Veronica ordered and Michelle offered up her wrists without really even thinking about it. 

“What’s on the agenda for today?” Michelle asked. _Keep her talking, don’t bring Morgan to her attention, don’t remind her--_ “Tea party? Oh, a movie? What’s the date-- there was this new Ava Duvernay flick coming out in November that I was super excited for--”

“You really don’t shut up, huh?” Veronica said flatly, tightening the handcuffs a notch too far so they dug into the raw, scarred skin of Michelle’s wrists and effectively shut her up with an unconscious whimper through clenched teeth. 

“MJ--”

“Shh, it’s okay,” Michelle said over her shoulder as Veronica started pulling her out the door. “I’ll see you in a bit, okay? Just sit tight-- Think of something tougher than _strawberry_ for when I get back!”

“ _Michelle--!”_

The door clanged shut and Veronica locked it and Michelle breathed deeply against the sound of Morgan pounding her little fists into the other side. 

“Let’s go,” Veronica said, hand gripping Michelle’s bicep as she dragged her down the barren corridor. 

Michelle didn’t argue for once, was too tired to really start fighting before she had too, and just let her bare feet stumble across frozen concrete. It had to be November-- the little pseudo-calendar that she and Morgan had been carving into the wall beside their cot estimated that they were about a week out of Thanksgiving, but they knew it was probably inaccurate. 

With the way they would sometimes keep Michelle out of the room for days at a time, with the way she was always disoriented beyond belief when she stumbled back in to find an emotionally wrecked Morgan, they weren’t exactly at their mental best. 

The room that Veronica tossed her into the center of without grandeur or remorse was a familiar one. Michelle’s shoulder slammed into the concrete floor, right there in front of the one-way mirror and the wind left her lungs in a fast, involuntary exhale. 

She coughed, trying to get her breath back as she pushed herself up with her still-bound hands. 

Veronica was already locking her in. 

“Hey, where you going?!” Michelle cried out in between hacking breaths. “Thought we were gonna-- hang out!” 

When she didn’t get a response, she figured this was just a new strategy they were trying and crawled awkwardly across the room so she could prop herself up against the wall. Usually there was something _in_ the room when they brought her here-- a tub of water, a casket with a padlock on the outside, a couple of guys in masks with obvious combat training. 

Today, nothing. 

It made her heart race more than was probably healthy. 

Michelle’s left wrist, where the handcuffs were tightest, began to trickle blood down her forearm as he pulled her knees up to her chest in a hopeless attempt to protect herself from whatever was to come next. 

It wouldn’t really, and she knew that, but she could pretend for the all of five minutes before the music started. 

Because five minutes in, the music started, because _of course it did,_ because _shouldn’t Michelle have seen this one coming?_

She hadn’t taken an entire course on the corruption of the US Military her sophomore year of college to just _forget_ one of their favorite torture tactics. 

Bright fluorescent lights, blaring scream metal through the speakers-- it was a sleep deprivation technique. 

She was going to be there for a while yet. 

*

Somewhere a few corridors away, behind a thrice-locked door, a ten year old girl curled up on a tiny cot and waited. 

For Michelle to come back. 

For these people to stop hurting them. 

For her Dad to finally, please, please _find them._

*

Michelle didn’t know how long it had been when she started crying. 

And she didn’t know how long it was after that when she started screaming obscenities at the mirror in the room. 

“Fuck you!” she yelled, throat raw and bound fists pounding against the reinforced glass. “You think this is going to work, you sick fucks?! Joke’s on you, I don’t fucking sleep anyway!” 

*

The music kept blaring. 

As she threw up in the corner, she thought maybe she recognized this song. 

*

“Not going crazy,” she mumbled to herself, too quiet even for her own ears to pick up. “Not going crazy, not going crazy, not going--”

The music shut off. Michelle’s entire body was trembling with anxiety and exhaustion, as if it wasn’t sure whether it should run or pass out. 

Her ears were ringing and she tried to crack her jaw to pop them because she should have been able to hear the door sliding open easier than she could. But mostly she was just caught on the sound of her own breath. 

“Miss Jones,” Veronica stepped inside, a fellow masked soldier accompanying her this time. They both had noise-cancelling headphones hung around their necks and Michelle didn’t want to try to extrapolate why. 

“How-- how long--”

“Nuh-uh, you answer our questions,” the man said. His name was probably something stupid like-- Matt. “That’s how this works.” 

“Name your source,” Veronica demanded. 

Michelle shook her head weakly. “No.” 

“Really?” Veronica cocked her head to the side. “All that and still nothing?” 

“What’d you think was gonna happen?” Michelle’s voice cracked on a bitter laugh, but Matt strode forward and the clap of his fist against her already ringing ear was enough to knock the laughter out of her, knock her bodily so her cheek planted flat on the concrete. 

A part of her was grateful for the reminder of which way was up as she gaped there like a fish kept too long from water.

“Name your source,” Matt crouched down close to her, a threatening shadow across her prone body. 

“George…” she coughed. “George… of the Jungle.”

That earned her a proper kick to the gut which left her struggling for breath all over again and made so she didn’t notice as the two soldiers slid on their headphones, motioning for something through the glass. 

“You had a chance,” Veronica shrugged. “But you just had to be a smartass.” 

The music started up again, and Michelle started to sob. 

*

Morgan told her it had been a couple of days at her best guess when Michelle was dropped back in their cell. 

She pulled Michelle’s head into her lap right there on the floor and combed her thin fingers through her curls, but at that point, even the young girl’s voice was more than Michelle could handle. 

“How can I help?” Morgan asked desperately, crying quietly. “MJ, can I-- what’ll help?”

“I need-- I--” Michelle pushed herself up on shaking hands, bands of scabbing red around her wrists, and started crawling. “Too bright in here. I just need-- fuck,” she pushed herself under the cot and with her back up against the wall, covering her face with her arms. 

Her head throbbed, her wrists stung, her ears continued to ring, ring, _ring._

And then the light got softer. 

“What…” Michelle cracked an eye open to see Morgan settling down in the small space beside her, a new blanket covering the opening to the room where the light filtered into their little fort, now diffused. _“Morgan,”_ she said in a broken breath of air. 

Smart girl. Smart, clever, beautifully _kind_ girl.

“You need to sleep,” Morgan whispered. “It’s okay, I’ll keep watch.” 

Michelle lifted an unsteady hand to cup Morgan’s cheek, running a thumb under her eye. 

“Thank you,” she said, knowing she was on the verge of losing consciousness simply from the remote feeling of safety she gained around that little girl, underneath that cot. “Thanks so much, girlie.” 

Morgan took two fingers and used them to oh so gently shut one of Michelle’s eyes, then the other. 

Michelle fell asleep. 

*

They had grabbed her out of thin air. 

That is to say, they had grabbed her out of a dark movie theater parking lot one night after she had taken Morgan to see the newest Pixar movie. It was quick and it was practiced, so much so that neither of the girls had a chance to scream before they were unconscious in the back of a van with tinted windows, being carted to an unknown location. 

Later, Michelle would realize that Morgan had never been a part of their plan, that all they’d wanted was to get their hands on Michelle Jones, investigative reporter who knew a little too much. But the kid had seen their faces, their truck, so the kid wasn’t going anywhere. 

As it turned out, the kid was as good a bargaining chip as anything. 

*

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” 

“Vegetable,” Michelle said in between small sips of water in an attempt to settle her stomach. 

“Is it really a vegetable or is it just a food?”

“Food,” Michelle nodded. “But vegetable-adjacent.” 

Morgan frowned. “Adjacent?”

“Similar to,” Michelle defined simply.

“Is it a fruit?” Morgan groused, earning her a grin. 

“Sure is, smarty.” 

“MJ you can’t pick _strawberry--”_ “It’s _not_ a strawberry,” Michelle laughed. “Keep asking.” 

Morgan huffed and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. It really was getting colder in their little room. Michelle didn’t want to think about what would happen if they got a proper frost. 

“Okay, um,” Morgan continued. “Is it crunchy?”

“Nope.”

“Juicy?” 

“All fruit is juicy, Mo.”

“But can you, like, make juice from it?” Morgan rolled her eyes. “Is it a normal fruit juice, is my question.” 

“It’s a very common juice,” Michelle said with a teasing mockery of Morgan’s eye roll. 

“Apple!”

“I just said it wasn’t crunchy!” Michelle laughed. 

“Grape?”

“You’re bad at this game,” Michelle took another sip of water, swallowed thickly. They had given her a sandwich a few hours prior, and she was desperately trying to keep it in her stomach. 

“Don’t be mean,” Morgan pouted, but Michelle knew her well enough by that point to tell she wasn’t actually bothered by the teasing. “Let me think…”

After a couple of quiet seconds, Michelle started humming the Jeopardy theme quietly under her breath. 

Morgan failed at holding back a snort of a laugh. _“MJ.”_

“You’re taking so long!” Michelle leaned back against the wall with mock-exasperation. “Think _juice_ , think _breakfast.”_

Morgan considered that for a moment...

“Orange?”

“We have a winner, ladies and gentlemen!” Michelle exclaimed as brightly as she could with the lingering dizziness in every part of her body, the unending exhaustion. 

The energy it took was worth it for proof that Morgan could still smile and laugh and look like a proper ten-year-old despite the fact that Michelle continued to prove incapable of saving her from a fight that wasn’t hers. 

_Keys in the door._ Michelle almost toppled over when she pushed herself to her feet in that same habitual movement, but Morgan didn’t stick to the script. 

“No,” Morgan’s face cracked into utter dismay. “No, no, they can’t, it’s-- it’s too soon, you just--”

“Morgan, sit down,” Michelle hissed. 

“No!” Morgan cried. “No! You only just got back-- you’re still-- you’re too hurt--”

“ _Morgan--”_

The door swung open and Michelle didn’t have a handle on the situation. She usually had a handle, she _always_ had a handle because she knew the routine and she knew how to keep their hands off of Morgan, but this wasn’t the routine, this wasn’t what they _did--_

“Get out!” Morgan screamed at the top of her lungs, trying with all her might to push Michelle behind her. God, what kind of self-sacrificial idiot was raising this kid? “Get out, get out, get _out!”_

“Aw, how sweet,” Veronica mused. “Get out of my way, kid. Big sister’s got an appointment down the hall.” 

“You _can’t!”_

“Morgan, sit down,” Michelle ordered harshly, pushing past her and offering up her wrists, only for Morgan to slap her hands back down. _“Morgan Stark--”_

Veronica back-handed the little girl without a second thought, sending her reeling to catch herself against the wall. 

“Hey!” Michelle yelled. “Don’t touch her-- fucking-- Just take me and do what you want, alright? Let’s go, let’s go have fucking brunch or whatever you have planned,” she held her torn-up wrists out in offering and tried to ignore the way Morgan was crying, the way there was a tiny cut on her cheek, a forming bruise. 

Veronica eyed Morgan and Michelle’s stomach lurched. 

“Please,” she begged. “Let’s just go and I’ll-- I’ll talk, alright?”

Her voice was trembling, and they both knew that in all likelihood she was lying, but Veronica rolled her eyes and locked Michelle’s hands up nonetheless. 

“MJ…” Morgan whimpered quietly. 

“It’s okay,” Michelle tried to remain as steady as she could as she was pushed out of the room. “I’ll see you later, girlie. I’ll be right back.” 

The door slammed shut behind them before Morgan could answer. 

*

It was a jug of water sort of day. 

“Why doesn’t Mister Boss Man ever stop by to say hello?” Michelle asked, clinging to her wit as she was shoved down onto a metal table. “You ever consider it’s just you I don’t wanna talk to? I’d love to chat with that guy.” 

“Shut up,” Veronica said, standing at Michelle’s head and covering her face with a thick towel. 

Before Michelle could think of a quippy response, the water was being poured over her face and it was time to start fighting back in a different way. 

It must have been Matt that was holding her down on that day-- he was the strongest and the best at dodging her flailing, kicking legs as she choked on too-cold water. She was sure she was going to drown this time, she was drowning, she was definitely _about to drown_ when Veronica pulled the towel away and Michelle was able to turn her head to the side to cough up an endless stream of water and bile. 

The tank top and shorts she’d been wearing since they’d captured her were well and truly soaked on top of being blood- and sweat-stained past viability as _clothing_. 

She heaved in a rattling breath, eyes and throat and nose stinging with violent irritation, and then Veronica had her shoved back and the towel over her face all over again. 

She hadn’t even bothered to ask that time. 

It felt endless, the stop and start of it all, and although Michelle had survived it before, had survived all of it before, every new trip under the flow of water had her convinced that it was the last time. 

Fuck. Of all the ways they could kill her, Michelle thought drowning would probably be the most miserable. 

She was choking again, just about ready to give it up once and for all, when out of nowhere Matt’s hands were no longer on her body. 

Matt’s hands were gone and the jug of water was falling, hitting the table next to her head, and toppling to the ground. Michelle’s hands were cuffed behind her, so she had to force herself onto her side and use that momentum to rid her face of the towel, choking, choking, _drowning_ all the while. 

Her ears were ringing again and she didn’t understand what was going on because the tears in her eyes were making it difficult to see but then, holy shit, _then--_

“MJ? Michelle-- there you go, get it out, try to breathe--”

She knew that voice, how did she know that voice? That voice definitely didn’t belong in that place so why was it right next to her ear and why did it have a gentle set of hands lifting her to sit up. 

“I know this sucks-- Fuck-- MJ, I’m sorry we have to go--”

_Peter._ That’s who the voice belonged to. 

Michelle sobbed. “Oh my _God,”_ she gasped, throat on fire. “You’re here, you’re here, you-- Morgan!”

She slid off the table, stumbling to her knees immediately because who was she really kidding, thinking she could hold her own weight at that point when she could barely even breathe. 

“Morgan,” she insisted. “We have to-- Turn right, first left, third door on the left-- She’s-- We have to--”

“We’ve got her already,” Peter reached behind her and snapped the chain holding her handcuffs together so she was just wearing two very painful bracelets instead, and then wrapped an arm around her waist to haul her to her feet. “Tony’s got her, I promise.” 

“She was alone in the room-- She needs-- She needs--”

“She’s safe, Em,” Peter turned her face to look at his, and even with the mask on the sight of him settled something in her. “I promise you she’s safe, but we have to go _now.”_

Michelle glanced around the room, finally registering the fact that there were three guards unconscious and webbed up to various walls and she almost laughed at the sight of it, _would_ have laughed if it hadn’t turned into another bout of coughing up bile onto the floor in front of her, onto her own feet. 

“Shit,” Peter muttered and then turned his head before continuing, as if he was speaking into his comm instead of to her. “We’re coming-- Hold for us, Wilson, she needs medical, like, yesterday--”

“Peter-- _Peter.”_

“I’m right here,” he turned his attention back to her immediately with a restless hand on her cheek, pushing wet hair out of her face. “You think you can walk if I help you? Or are you gonna let me carry you?”

“I can walk,” she choked. “I can do it.” 

“Alright, let’s get out of here.”

*

She let Peter lead her blindly through the maze of hallways, stumbling on shaky legs and wincing at the feeling of his strong arm, tight around what might have been a broken rib or might have been that same pulled muscle from before. 

It may have been both, but Michelle couldn’t focus on that in the moment, not when they turned the corner and came face to face with four soldiers rushing towards them and all the fear she’d been pushing down, down, down for weeks flooded to the forefront of her brain.

“No-- _no, no, no,”_ she careened backwards, only staying upright with the assistance of Peter’s arms around her waist. 

“Fuck, we’re okay,” Peter shot out a couple of webs that didn’t meet their mark because he was preoccupied with pushing her behind him, with keeping her on her feet. “ _Fuck--”_

Just as one of the guards lifted a gun in their direction, Wanda Maximoff came sprinting around the corner and threw the whole group of them backwards with a blast of red energy. 

“Get her out of here!” Wanda yelled at them, hands still held aloft as if expecting another incoming threat. “I’ll be right behind you.” 

“Be careful,” Peter nodded to her, before turning to Michelle. “We’re doing the carrying thing now, you can be mad at me about it later,” he said, even as he was already lifting her up onto his back and locking her ankles around his waist. 

Michelle didn’t bother arguing, just held on tight and tried to breathe as he ran, ran, ran towards the end of the corridor where a steel door had been blown straight off of its hinges. 

Orange sunlight filtered in through the doorway and Michelle felt the world slow down into a blurring, infinite moment as grey walls and musty air turned into a wide open field and bright, saturated sunset. A Quinjet, silhouetted against the treeline stood open and awaiting them and Peter didn’t slow down so much as a beat until they were fully up the ramp and skidding to a stop. 

“Morgan?” Michelle immediately croaked as she pushed herself off of Peter’s back and staggered to stand on her own two feet once more. Sam appeared out of the cockpit and Wanda rushed onto the jet behind them, slamming the trigger to close the ramp. 

“We’ve got everyone, Nat-- let’s go,” Sam said over his shoulder and Michelle felt the engine rev below her feet. 

“No-- No, where’s Morgan?” Michelle’s voice cracked, desperate in a way she wasn’t sure it had ever been, not even in the time she’d spent in the facility they were leaving behind. “You said-- You said she was--”

“MJ!”

“Oh thank _God,”_ Michelle sobbed, falling to her knees the second she saw Morgan out of the small medical pod, followed closely behind by a clearly-overwhelmed Tony Stark. 

Morgan fell into Michelle’s arms without a shred of self consciousness and Michelle cried harder at the sight of her, at the relief of getting her hands on her once more. 

“You’re okay?” she asked the girl, running her hands across her narrow shoulders and down her arms in search of injuries. “Did you get hurt? Do you need anything--”

“I’m okay, MJ, promise,” Morgan said certainly, but allowing Michelle to look her over nonetheless. 

“You’re okay,” Michelle exhaled something between another sob and a burst of a laugh. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she clutched Morgan around her waist and let her forehead fall against her tummy as she tried to gather herself. 

“Dad? Can MJ have a blanket please?” Morgan asked somewhere just outside of Michelle’s awareness. “They used the water, she needs to warm up.” 

“I-- Yeah,” Tony said, watching the both of them with barely restrained restlessness, a terrible understanding that not only had the young woman before him been waterboarded but that his ten-year-old daughter knew what that meant now. “Of course, kiddo.”

“I got it,” Sam squeezed Tony’s shoulder as he passed by in his search for a blanket. 

“We need to check out her lungs too,” Peter said quietly. “Make sure she doesn’t dry drown.” 

Michelle hiccuped, unable to get control of her breathing as she pulled away from Morgan and covered her mouth with one of her hands, rocking forward to rest her weight on the other and keeping her head ducked low. 

_Get ahold of yourself, get ahold of yourself, get ahold--_

“Em,” Peter had replaced Morgan in front of her and placed a cautious hand on her jaw. “Hey, I need you to look at me for a second so I know you’re hearing me. You’re breathing a little too fast, okay?” 

Michelle looked up at him, mask discarded and eyes wide with worry. She wasn’t sure when Morgan had crossed the space to sit in her dad’s lap or when Wanda had made her way into the cockpit, or when Sam had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. 

It was as if everything was happening in flashes of lucidity, all disjointed and forcing Michelle to lose chunks of time as she remained collapsed on the floor of the jet. But that was definitely Peter in front of her, holding one of her hands to his chest and breathing slowly, deeply in some attempt to help her ground herself. 

Michelle forced breath into her lungs, forced it back out. 

In. And out. Hand clutched at Peter’s suit. And In. And out. 

“That’s better,” Peter murmured, just for her despite the close quarters of everyone currently on the jet. Michelle let her head tip forward to rest her forehead on his collarbone and he cupped the nape of her neck with his hand, thumb getting tangled up in her curls. 

“You found us,” she breathed up against him. 

“Yeah,” Peter’s grip tightened on her infinitesimally. “Yeah, Em.” 

*

In the three hours it took for them to get back to the Compound, Sam went ahead and checked out both Michelle and Morgan for any emergent medical concerns. 

“Okay, Morgan, does anything hurt?”

“They didn’t touch her-- They didn’t,” Michelle blurted. “I made sure they didn’t-- I tried to keep her--”

“Alright,” Sam cut her off calmly. “I know, I just want to make sure nothing happened on the way out.”

Michelle nodded, not letting go of Morgan’s hand where they both sat on the exam table. They had already bandaged Michelle’s wrists, checked her lungs for stray water and found she would be okay until they could get to the actual medbay, and stitched up a gash on her thigh she didn’t remember getting. 

Tony leaned against the wall across from them, and Michelle felt as if maybe she should get up, allow him to sit next to his daughter and hold onto her and be comforted by her presence, but Michelle couldn’t really find it in herself to move quite yet. 

Not when it had been her sole responsibility to keep Morgan safe from danger for however long they’d been sequestered to their little prison, not when shaking that responsibility was definitely going to take more than a couple of hours of relative safety. 

Michelle knew the big bad hadn’t been defeated yet. As much as they could tell her the ordeal was over, she knew, knew, _knew_ that it wasn’t. 

So she stayed by Morgan’s side the entire ride home, and when the girl started to shiver, she handed over her blanket. 

*

When the Quinjet landed right outside the Compound, Morgan ran down the ramp and straight into her mother’s arms. Pepper held on tight, and was in turn held by Tony right there in the browning grass under the light of the moon. 

Peter kept his arm around Michelle’s waist as they disembarked, as though he thought she might topple over if he let go. She didn’t have any parents to run to anyway, because they probably didn’t know she had been gone, didn’t talk to her often enough for the lack of correspondence to be all that unusual. 

So she trudged towards the big glass doors, daydreaming about a fresh set of clothes, until a soft hand on her arm stopped her in her tracks. 

“Michelle?”

Her heart sunk at the sight of a crying Pepper Potts. Michelle wasn’t ready for this conversation, wasn’t ready to apologize, wasn’t ready to take the punishment she had most certainly earned for getting that little girl wrapped up in something that could be completely and totally blamed on Michelle Jones. 

“I’m-- Miss Potts, I’m so sorry--”

“Thank you,” Pepper cut her off by pulling her into a rib-cracking hug. “Thank you, _thank you.”_

“I-- I don’t--”

Pepper pulled away and looked her in the eye. 

“You did good, sweetheart,” she implored. “God, I’m so glad you’re okay.” 

Michelle wasn’t sure how she had any tears left, but by the time they made it inside, Pepper’s shirt was soaked in them. 

She could apologize properly in the morning. 


	2. Call for Help

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter set a mug and a plate of peanut butter toast down in front of her and claimed the stool next to hers, his feet situated snugly on one of the rungs below her seat. 
> 
> “Thanks,” she said quietly, pulling the steaming mug close to her chest. Peter wondered if she was cold, or hurting, or if he should turn up the thermostat, or-- “You’re staring, Parker.” 
> 
> “My bad,” he smirked to cover up everything he was feeling. “I have this thing with your face where I like looking at it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting a day early simply because I feel like it!
> 
> Thanks for stopping by and hope you enjoy <3

Peter stayed by Michelle’s side, sat on the bed and combed his fingers through her hair until she finally succumbed to her obvious exhaustion and fell into a restless sleep. 

He stayed, he watched her breathing level out, and then he hurried out of the room and burst into tears in the hallway. Peter’s stability was in his strength, and Michelle had needed to share in that stability, but he had also been on the verge of breaking from the moment he had seen her struggling on that table and needed to get it out of his system if he was going to continue being everything she needed, whatever she needed when she woke back up. 

There was an empty expanse of untouched space in the center of his gut as he leaned heavily against the wall and did his best to keep his tears from developing into a full-blown panic attack. Part of him wanted to stand sentry outside of their bedroom for the entire night and another part wanted to get as far away as possible in case it was _his_ presence that was actively ruining Michelle’s life, so once he got his breathing under control he split the difference and made his way to the kitchen. 

Tony was already there, tablet in hand and steaming mug by his elbow. 

“Hey,” he looked up when Peter entered and made a beeline for the pot of coffee on the counter. “She asleep?”

“Yeah, finally,” Peter cleared his throat, trying and failing to swallow some of the emotion caught in there. “Morgan?”

“Her and her mom are bed hogs,” he smiled softly, not without an edge of something else clinging to his brow. 

Peter snorted softly into his mug, taking a long sip as he leaned his weight back into the counter to face Tony. The lights were dim, and the brightness of Tony’s tablet was the primary illumination on his tired face. Peter wondered if it was dark enough to cover the lingering tears in his eyes, the splotchy redness of his cheeks, the shake to his hands. 

Probably not. 

“You hanging in there, kid?” Tony spoke quietly, soft enough so as to not crack the delicate peace surrounding them. 

Peter nodded, but he pursed his lips and looked away with a frustrated hum of a sound as he tried to keep from breaking down all over again. 

“She’s okay,” Tony leaned forward on his elbows, head dipped to try and catch Peter’s eye. “We got her back. She’s safe, Pete.” 

“They had her held down on a-- a metal table,” Peter choked out. “Pouring jug after jug of water over her face, she was-- she was kicking-- she was--”

Tony stood from his stool and approached Peter with arms open, pulling him in against his chest. 

“Okay, you’re okay,” he murmured. 

“We have to talk to her about it, we need to know what they did, what they _wanted,”_ Peter trundled on. “But I don’t know how the _fuck_ I’m supposed to ask her about it.” 

Tony pulled away and held Peter by his shoulders, eyes set sternly. 

“You won’t be the one asking her, that’s how,” he said definitively. 

“If she wants to talk about it--”

“If she wants to talk about it, that’s her decision, but the debrief?” Tony looked at him insistently. “Sam and Natasha are doing that part, got it?” 

Peter nodded, composed himself, and told himself to _get it._ After all, if he was going to trust anyone’s word on this, shouldn’t it be Tony Stark’s? Shouldn’t it be the word of the man who knew better than anyone how to survive that sort of second-hand suffering? 

“You and Michelle are more resilient than you give yourselves credit for,” Tony continued. “This isn’t gonna break you.” 

Peter ran his thumb around the rim of his mug, swallowing the question of _what if it already has?_

“Okay,” he said instead. “I’m okay.” 

But what if he wasn’t? 

*

Eventually, Peter made his way back to his room and crawled into bed beside Michelle. 

She was curled up with her face buried in the pillow, wrapped around herself in a protective sort of way even in her sleep (or perhaps especially in her sleep, when she had the least amount of warning for an assault). 

Peter tucked one arm under his head and rested his other hand on the mattress between them, not daring to touch her for fear of waking her from much needed rest and slowly, carefully, let the sound of her breathing help him drift to sleep. 

*

He awoke abruptly to Michelle kneeling on the bed and shaking his shoulder. 

“Peter-- Peter, wake up,” she said urgently, notes of fear in her voice that had Peter sitting up and forcing himself to alertness in a matter of seconds. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, studying her for signs of injury but only seeing the same clean bandages she’d been adorned with when she went to sleep. 

“Morgan’s gone,” she implored, frantic and certain all at once. “I woke up and-- and I went-- to check on her and she’s-- Peter she’s not in her room--”

“Okay, okay, wait a second,” Peter tried to slow her down, slow the moment down even as she was trying to pull him out of bed by his hand. 

“I’m serious, I’m-- this isn’t a fucking _joke--”_

“Friday, can you check and see if Morgan is still in bed with her parents?” Peter hated to talk over her, but knew that more was needed than his mediocre-at-best calming techniques to turn the current situation from a rapid downwards spiral to something more akin to a soft landing. 

“Yes, Peter,” Friday replied calmly. “Morgan is currently asleep in the master bedroom.” 

Michelle seemed to hear this, process it, and make a decision all before turning on her heel and walking out the door. 

Peter grabbed a zip-up sweatshirt off the floor and tugged it on as he hurried after her, falling into stride beside her all the way to the bedroom door in question. He didn’t stop her from cracking the door open, he could see the care she was taking with being quiet and knew there was no harm, only comfort to be gained from this course of action. 

Instead, he wrapped his arms around her waist from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder as she looked in on Morgan, sleeping soundly in between her parents. 

“She’s okay,” he murmured into her hair. “You both are.” 

“Yeah,” she breathed in response as Peter pressed a kiss to the spot right behind her ear. 

Peter could feel some of the tension actively leaving her body as she quietly closed the door and slumped back ever so slightly into his chest. 

“Do you want to go back to bed or are you up now?” he asked, no judgment in his tone, really just mirroring one of Michelle’s go-to moves for a post-nightmare morning for Peter. 

He had never really been on the other side of it, so he had to take his cues from her. 

“I’m up now,” she sighed. “But you can go back to sleep. I know you were probably up a lot later than me.” 

“Nah, come on,” he draped an arm over her shoulders and led her back down the hallway. “I think I saw some of those fancy coffee beans you pretend not to like in the freezer.” 

And if he caught sight of a faint smile on her lips out of the corner of his eye, he was going to count that as a win. 

*

Peter took his time making that really nice French press coffee that Michelle only drank when someone else was paying for it while she sat at the kitchen island and skimmed over a week-old newspaper that had been lying there. 

She was wearing one of his too-big ESU sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants that he thought Pepper was lending her and her hair was slowly but surely falling out of a loose top-knot at the crown of her head. Cheek in palm and one knee curled up against her chest, she looked young. 

Younger than her twenty-three years should have suggested, younger than the bandages around her wrists, the bruising on her face should have allowed. 

Peter set a mug and a plate of peanut butter toast down in front of her and claimed the stool next to hers, his feet situated snugly on one of the rungs below her seat. 

“Thanks,” she said quietly, pulling the steaming mug close to her chest. Peter wondered if she was cold, or hurting, or if he should turn up the thermostat, or-- “You’re staring, Parker.” 

“My bad,” he smirked to cover up everything he was feeling. “I have this thing with your face where I like looking at it.” 

Michelle expelled an amused breath through her nose and smiled faintly at him before looking back down at the newspaper in front of her. She turned to the front page. 

“Is that the date?” she asked. 

Peter inhaled sharply. “No,” he said apologetically. “That’s old.” 

She pushed it away with what sounded like an involuntary hum of dissatisfaction or discontent or just plain sadness. When she spoke, it was as if she was trying to be quiet enough that only Peter would hear her, that not even the air in the room would be disrupted by her words. 

“How long?”

“Just over a month,” he said. “Thirty-four days.” 

“Missed Halloween,” she said, not quite hitting the mark of _glib_ but the intent was there. 

“We’ll do it up big next year,” Peter promised. 

Michelle seemed to consider something for a moment before promptly leaning over and kissing him once on the lips. 

“What was that for?” he said with an uncontrollable, earnest smile. 

“Missed you,” she shrugged and took a sip of coffee. While the mug was still at her lips, Peter pressed a longer, more lingering kiss to her cheek. 

He didn’t have the words for it at the present time, but he hoped she understood what he so desperately wished to say. 

*

Michelle had fallen back asleep on the couch with a tablet on her chest by the time Morgan was dragging her parents out of bed and demanding pancakes. 

Peter was sitting on the floor next to where Michelle’s head was pillowed at the end of the couch. He stole the tablet carefully out of her hands and began to scroll through the tabs and tabs of news articles she had been setting aside to read. 

She had been trying to get caught up on what she’d missed. 

“Peter,” Morgan whispered surprisingly gently, squatting down in front of him. “We’re making pancakes, do you want some?” 

“Sure, kiddo,” he smiled at her. “Thank you very much.”

“Should we make some for MJ too?” 

“Yeah,” Peter nodded, thinking about the toast left untouched on the kitchen counter. “But we might have to warm them up later for her. She had an early morning so I wanna let her sleep a bit longer, okay?” 

“I know,” Morgan said in a way that told him maybe she really did, better than any of the rest of them. “Yesterday was an extra long day so she needs extra rest.” 

And then she reached out and pulled the blanket around Michelle’s hips all the way up to her collarbone with a level of careful tenderness that Peter had never associated with the girl before. 

It was startling, not the strength that Morgan seemed to have in bouncing back as quickly as she was, but the intimacy she and Michelle had developed during their time spent isolated together. They had always gotten along of course-- drawing lessons with Michelle were one of Morgan’s favorite pastimes-- but something had very clearly shifted and Peter had seen it the moment they were all on the jet ride home the night before. 

The two of them would always be connected by this shared trauma, and as sweet as it was to watch them develop such protective instincts over one another, the sight of it made Peter ache from head to toe. 

Instincts built from necessity in order to survive would always feel a little sharper at the edges. 

*

Peter didn’t mean to doze off right there on the floor with this neck craned at an awkward angle and Michelle’s tablet in his lap, but apparently it was just going to be one of those days for everyone involved. 

To be fair, he was asleep for a grand total of forty-five minutes before he was pushing his tired body off of the floor and trying to crack the kink out of his neck. Michelle rolled onto her side in her sleep and Peter decided that he would let her stay there until lunch and went in search of the pancakes that had been left warming on a plate in the oven for him.

Sam found him just as he was shoveling his first bite of food into his mouth at the kitchen table and snorted at the sight of him. 

“Your appetite back, then?” he raised an eyebrow and sat down in the opposite seat at the table. 

“Looks like it,” Peter said through a full mouth. 

“Glad I won’t have to yell at you about eating anymore.”

Peter snorted. “Ditto,” he said, not mentioning how glad he was to be past pretty much every aspect of the previous month. The lack of appetite, the lack of sleep, the constant anxiety and uncertainty and overwhelming helplessness. 

It shouldn’t have taken them as long as it had to track down the brutalist concrete building where their girls were being held, and even still they were lacking in proper answers, but at least they weren’t stuck begging for simple proof of life anymore. 

“Has she said anything to you about it yet?” Sam asked. 

“No, Sam,” Peter set down his fork with a heavy breath. “She’s-- I mean, come on, you can’t expect her to be ready--”

“Kid, I know it sucks, I get it,” Sam put up a placating hand. He wasn’t trying to fight and as much as Peter was aware of this, he was also missing certain qualities that allowed him to be calm in the face of high stress. “But this isn’t over yet. You know it isn’t over yet.”

“I know,” Peter crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair, reminded himself that Michelle didn’t need him to fight her battles in this way. 

“If they said anything, if she saw anything that can help us track down these guys we need to know about it,” Sam said. “It’s the only way we’ll be able to find them at this point.” 

“Trust me, I want to track those--those--those bastards down as much as the rest of you,” Peter spoke with a quiet, but frenetic energy. “But can we hold off on the interrogation for one day? Can we please just give her until tomorrow?” 

Sam, in all his sympathetic generosity conceded with a simple, “Sure, kid. We can do it tomorrow.” 

“Thank you,” Peter said with a cracking voice and a swipe of thumb and forefinger over his eyes. 

“Your Aunt’s stopping by later, yeah?”

“Tonight,” Peter nodded. 

“You’re gonna let her take care of you a little bit?” Sam replied, and Peter knew an order when he heard it. 

“Sure thing, Cap.” 

*

The day, which was proving to pass by like molasses, brought about lunch time in what was only a couple of hours but felt like an eternity. 

Michelle woke up on her own when Tony started clattering around in the kitchen and made her way over with an offer of assistance. Tony, of course, wouldn’t let her, so she simply resumed her reading of the news from the past month and sat with Peter in companionable silence as the smell of grilled cheese and tomato soup filled the room. 

“Why’d you let me sleep so long?” Michelle asked when the two of them got up to set the table. 

“Because sleep is good for you, Em,” he chuckled, refraining from mentioning any of the thousand reasons she definitely needed it. 

She rolled her eyes at him and Tony gave him a sympathetic look before asking Friday to inform Pepper and Morgan that lunch was ready. 

And then they sat down, the five of them around the kitchen table as if everything was normal. Not just their collective, twisted, atypical sort of normal, but the version of normality that regular people had the privilege of basking in. 

Quiet and polite and with zero acknowledgment of the various zoo animals suffocating them from the outside in, it made Peter jittery and, apparently, he wasn’t the only one. 

Because halfway through the meal, Morgan started crying. 

Maybe it shouldn’t have felt quite as abrupt as it did, concerning she had been home for less than twenty-four hours, but no one could be sure if there was something specific that triggered it as Pepper hopped out of her seat and pulled Morgan into her arms. 

“Mom, I don’t-- I--”

“Shh, it’s okay baby,” Pepper murmured as she lifted her daughter onto her hip and started down the hallway towards her bedroom. 

Michelle was halfway out of her seat, seemingly by instinct alone, when Tony pressed a hand into her forearm. 

“They’re okay,” he said, pulling Michelle away from wherever she had gone. She looked down at herself and sat back in her chair with a baffled look on her face, as if caught off guard by her own actions. 

“Sorry,” she said under her breath. Peter placed a hand on her knee in response and Tony shook his head. 

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. 

Michelle pulled off the crust of her sandwich, tearing it into tiny pieces like she used to on big test days in high school, a nervous tic that Peter thought had gone by the wayside with age and time and confidence. 

“Not sure about that,” she said without lifting her eyes. 

“Em, it wasn’t your fault,” Peter said with a squeeze to her leg, but she didn’t acknowledge the attempted comfort, didn’t acknowledge him at all. 

“When do I have to debrief?” she asked instead, finally looking up at them. 

“Tomorrow if you think you can manage it,” Tony responded. 

“Sure.”

“Is there anything we can-- do? Anything you need before then?” 

“No. I’m gonna need to go to my place at some point, though,” she said. “I can’t live in your wife’s clothes forever.” 

“May and Happy are stopping by your apartment to pick up a few things right now. They’ll be here in a few hours,” Tony said, and Peter could see the way being _told_ instead of _asked_ bristled the edges of Michelle’s mood. “If you have a list--”

“I can’t just go myself?” Michelle cut him off, shoulders hitching up ever so slightly. 

“Michelle…”

“You’re not going to let me leave,” she said. It wasn’t a question. 

“We’re going to keep you and Morgan here at the Compound until this whole thing is sorted,” Tony explained. “It’s safer that way.”

“You gonna lock the door and throw away the key?” Michelle said with a bitter smirk adorning her lips. Peter’s heart stuttered in his chest. 

“MJ-- No, that’s not--”

“I know, I know, I was kidding,” she took his hand in hers, soothing him when it should have been the other way around. “Trust me, I get it. I have a target on my back right now.” 

Peter didn’t love how downright accepting she sounded about that conclusion, but then she finally took a real bite of her sandwich instead of just tearing it to pieces and he decided not to rock the decidedly unbalanced boat. 

“This isn’t bad,” she said around a mouthful of grilled cheese, filling the silence left by two men whose concentration was occupied by trying to save her from every potential threat available, including herself. 

“Your surprise is flattering,” Tony deadpanned. 

Michelle laughed and Peter got whiplash. 

*

Peter eavesdropped on a conversation between Sam and Natasha happening a floor above him. 

They were outlining everything they needed to discuss with Michelle, the best way to discover the most minute details that even Michelle herself might not have considered important, the details she might struggle to remember, the details she might not have wanted to. 

Peter took a meandering walk to the other end of the Compound where there was no risk of him overhearing any more of that. 

*

May didn’t cry when she came barreling out of the elevator in the living room, but she pulled Michelle off the couch where she was writing, writing, writing on a handful of crumpled scratch paper and held her for longer than most people could get away with from Michelle Jones. 

Not only that, but Michelle hugged her back. 

Their love for each other extended beyond their mutual love of Peter, and it was something that Peter hadn’t noticed as it was happening. Fairly so too, because it wasn’t his to be a part of, it wasn’t his to intrude upon, it was simply his to feel warmed and elated by from a distance. 

When they were young, Michelle had been wary of May Parker’s hands-on parenting techniques, the way she was willing to talk about nearly anything with Peter at any given moment, the way that casual intimacy was extended to every friend that Peter brought home with him. But at some point she had begun to lean into it. 

At some point, May’s contact information in Michelle’s phone had stopped being an emergency contact for the friend she sometimes went out of the state with for competitions and became a real person that she could really talk to and really ask for advice when being a teenage girl out in the world became a little trickier than she could handle on her own. 

They loved each other now, with or without Peter’s influence, and as he watched them reunite in the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows, he thought that maybe if bringing them together at all was the only good thing he ever did that maybe it would all be worth it. 

“My girl, look at you,” May said as she pulled away and held Michelle’s face in her hands, thumbs swiping across freshly flushed cheeks. 

“Sorry I missed lunch, uh, Thursday-- three Thursday’s ago?” Michelle smiled sheepishly as Peter leaned against the doorway to the kitchen, utterly forgotten and happy to be. 

“Yes, you’re going to have to have a lot of lunches with me to make up for it,” May replied, effortlessly getting a small chuckle out of Michelle. 

“I accept my punishment,” she shrugged. 

May’s face dropped for a barely perceptible moment as she took in the various cuts and bruises adorning Michelle’s skin. Peter could see the knowledge that there were more hidden under Michelle’s baggy clothes sink into his Aunt’s ever-replenishing well of empathy. 

“Have you called your parents?” she asked quietly, and Michelle’s face fell. 

“No, I--” she shook her head. “No reason to bother them with this, it’ll all be resolved soon enough.” 

“I can call you for them,” May offered. “We can come up with a different story-- I can tell them whatever you want me to.” 

“Thank you, but it’s really okay, May.” 

There was a melancholy there, always was when Michelle’s family came up in conversation, but May was well-versed enough in that young woman to know when it was or was not the time to push it. 

“Okay,” she nodded with a comforting squeeze to Michelle’s shoulder. “Okay.” 

Peter didn’t know Michelle’s parents. He had only met her mother, Eloise, once in high school back when the two of them were still just friends on the same decathlon team. 

It wouldn’t be until later-- much later, after a few years of hesitant offerings of rides home and an obvious lack of a Jones family cheering section at meets-- that Peter started to understand. They were divorced, which was good because the marriage had been bad, but also meant that neither one of them were particularly keen on remembering that it had ever happened in the first place. 

Michelle was the one continuing aspect of their disastrous marriage that they couldn’t ignore, but that didn’t stop them from trying. 

“Oh, we brought you some things from your apartment,” May said, expertly changing the subject just as Happy appeared at her side with a duffle bag. “Hap, will you--”

“I’ll go grab the other bag,” he nodded, looking at Michelle meaningfully before turning back around. “Good to see you home, kid.” 

“Thanks, Happy,” she replied. “Thank you both-- You didn’t have to do this.”

She slung the bag over her shoulder, gripping the strap tight in her hands. 

May brushed her off with a wave of her hand. “Come on, I’ll help you unpack,” she placed a guiding hand on Michelle’s shoulder and sent a look to Peter over her shoulder as they made their way out of the room. 

It was a look that said _I’ll be back,_ it was a look that said _good job,_ it was a look that said _I’m here for both of you._

*

She found him in the gym not all that much later, after he had retreated to allow space for Michelle to latch onto May as much as she wanted or needed. 

Peter, busy bruising his knuckles on a punching bag, knew that she was watching him before she spoke. 

“Someone hasn’t paid their hug tax this month.”

Arms crossed and a lopsided smile on her face, May was better than all the rest of them at looking put together in the middle of a family crisis. Perhaps it was experience. Perhaps Peter would be that good at it one day.

He didn’t want to think about it. 

“I’m sweaty,” he said with a grimace, even as she crossed the room to meet him in the middle. 

“Like I give a shit,” she pulled his head into the crook of her neck like she used to when he was still shorter than her. 

He breathed. Sometimes he thought he only really got the adequate amount of oxygen when all of his people were under the same roof, safe and within arms reach and whole. It was exhausting, trying to get through the day without enough breath in his lungs, so he took the opportunity to really relish in it. 

“She’s putting on a brave face, huh?” May looked him in the eye, studied him for signs of dishonesty or cracks in his armor or something of the like. 

“When is she not?” he replied with a bitter pseudo-smile. 

“There’s a learning curve here,” May continued with all sincerity. “In being what she needs right now. But you’re a real smart cookie, Mister Parker.” 

Peter bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. 

“Don’t let me fuck it up?” he pleaded, right on a precipice. 

May just held him tighter. 

*

Morgan didn’t need much of a check-up in the medbay, but she trailed after Michelle when she made the trip later that evening. 

They held hands in the elevator and Peter watched as Morgan helped Michelle recall some of the injuries she had sustained but since forgotten about, recorded over in those dark parts of her mind. 

“Any other breaks that you’re aware of?” Doctor Cho asked gently. “Anything that feels like maybe it started healing?”

“Um…” Michelle furrowed her brow, looked down at her own body where she was seated on the exam table, as if taking stock of it. “I don’t…”

“Your ankle got all swollen the first week, remember?” Morgan chimed in. “We tore up the pillowcase so we could wrap it up.” 

“Right, yeah,” Michelle nodded. No one else could probably see the hint of embarrassment in her eyes, but Peter could. 

“Any soreness?” Cho asked. 

“It’s-- I mean, a little stiff? I’m not having trouble walking or anything though,” Michelle said. “I think it was really just a sprain, I just twisted it when-- Um-- Yeah.” 

Peter’s stomach roiled and he had to step out of the room as Cho explained that she wanted to do an x-ray in case it needed re-setting, but it was probably okay if it wasn’t hurting. He hated himself a little bit, because Morgan was a child and was handling the whole thing better than him, but he just needed-- he needed--

He needed for it to have never happened but bar that he needed a _second_ where he didn’t have to visualize all the different ways the love of his life had been tortured in a cement room so many miles away from home, trying to protect a little girl all the while. 

He needed that. 

*

“I looked after her as best I could,” Morgan said to him later, a confession of sorts that stole the breath from Peter’s lungs. 

“I know you did, Mo,” he assured her. 

“Daddy said it’s gonna take time to get back to normal.”

The use of _Daddy,_ an identifier she’d dropped from her vocabulary years previously, made Peter’s eyes sting. She was so, _so_ fucking young, so unbearably new to the world, so unprepared for the life she was currently living. 

“I bet he also told you that that’s okay?” Peter implored. “That you’re allowed to take your time?” 

Morgan nodded and a passing moment of monumental contemplation filled the air between them before she got a harrowing look on her face. 

“It’s gonna take MJ a long time,” she said, horribly knowing. “They really, really hurt her, Petey.” 

A breath in through his nose, held until it hurt. 

“I know,” he exhaled. “We’re gonna help her.” 

*

The problem with a promise like that to a girl who had endless faith in him was that he had no earthly idea how to accomplish it. 

How was he supposed to help Michelle when all he knew was how to be helped by her? How was he meant to be the strong one when, contrary to how it may have looked from the outside, that had always been her? 

How could he help when she acted as though she didn’t need any? 

“Hey, can I borrow your phone for a minute?” she asked, perched on the edge of the bed as soon as he walked out of the en suite bathroom. 

“Shit, we need to get you a new one don’t we?” Peter grabbed his phone off the bedside table and tossed it to her without a second thought. 

“Not urgent,” she brushed him off, already moving for the door. “I’ll be right back.”

“Oh-- Okay,” he frowned as the door swung shut behind her, as her footsteps hurried down the hall farther and farther away from his sensitive ears. 

It wouldn’t have felt odd, it wouldn’t have felt out of the ordinary if Peter wasn’t so aware of how well Michelle knew the range of his senses. 

He might not have even given her request a second thought, but she was very obviously trying not to be heard. 

All he had been trying to do all day was listen, and Michelle was going out of her way not to be _heard._

She thanked him with a kiss to his cheek when she climbed back into bed and handed Peter his phone.

“Yeah, of course,” he said, not even bothering to look down at it in his hands. “Need anything else?”

“No, I’m okay,” she smiled softly up at him as she settled down into her pillow. And then, with a realization in her eyes, “Actually, do you know where we could get strawberries this time of year?”

*

When Peter checked the call logs on his phone after Michelle was asleep, all he found was one seven minute call to a blocked number. 

He tried not to make any assumptions. 

He was particularly bad at not making any assumptions. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Week: Chapter Three, "Plan P" 
> 
> As always, your comments and kudos are deeply appreciated and you can find me on tumblr @ premiere-pro <3


	3. Plan P

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sorry, sorry,” she swiped at her face with a frantic movement of her hand, as if they couldn’t see her openly crying. “I know-- I mean the things you have been through and here I am…” 
> 
> “Yes, we’ve been through a lot,” Natasha said simply. “But the difference is, we signed up for it, Michelle. You didn’t.” 
> 
> Michelle met her eye, internalized the empathy she saw there, the kindness and the strength that brought with it, the terrifying understanding. 
> 
> “I did though,” she shrugged helplessly. “I did sign up for exactly this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning (ft. minor spoilers): towards the end of this chapter a character initiates the beginnings of a sexual encounter when they are not mentally fit to be doing so. The encounter ends before any sex actually starts, but it is still emotionally taxing for both people involved. Not non-con at all really bc the moment there are signs of distress it ends, but wanted to be safe and warn you ahead of time <3 
> 
> thank you for stopping by and thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos, hope you enjoy!

When Michelle struggled out of bed and fell to her knees in front of the toilet after she woke up the next morning, she let Peter believe it was nerves because that excuse was at least partially true. Yes, she was buzzing with apprehension for the morning to come, the debrief that had been looming over her and keeping her from sleep for most of the night, but she was also quite simply, sick. 

It had been over a month since she had eaten as much in a twenty-four hour period as she had the previous day, but being that honest with Peter felt like it would cause more grief for both of them than it was worth. 

She wasn’t blind, and more than that Peter wasn’t a good liar, so she could see in every angle of his face, every tensed muscle on his lithe frame that he was _scared._ Whether for her, of her, or both was up for debate, but the mere presence of his fright certainly wasn’t. 

“If you need more time before you do this, I can get you more time,” Peter said, sitting on the lip of the bathtub while Michelle brushed her teeth. 

She spat into the sink. “I don’t need more time.”

“I’m just saying-- You don’t _have_ to do this today,” Peter lied, maybe more to himself than her even. 

“Yes, I do, Peter,” she wiped her mouth off with a hand towel, looking at him instead of herself in the mirror. 

He visibly steeled himself before standing and placing his hands on her waist. 

“Yeah,” he said, pulling her all the way into his universe. “Yeah, okay. I’ll be there when you’re done.” 

“I know,” she said. 

_I know you, Peter Parker. As if you’d be anywhere else._

*

They sat her down in a comfortable, den-like room, obviously aiming for both privacy and comfort, obviously conscious of the fact that Michelle was not a soldier and had no prior experience with a conversation of this sort. 

With a life of this sort. 

In college, Michelle had taken a number of courses that required one-on-one oral exams with her professors. She was actually pretty good at these. She was better at them than presentations, worse at them than written essays, but still never quite figured out the correct way to prepare. 

Once she was there it went relatively smoothly because Michelle Jones was nothing if not skilled at making her point, but in the days and weeks leading up to an oral exam, she was wracked with anxiety over what the final topic might be, what sort of thesis she would need to present, what of the material was the most important to commit to memory. 

The debrief felt a bit like that-- she technically had all of the answers right there at her disposal, but it was oh, so much more complicated than that. They just wanted the truth of what happened to her, Sam explained, and of course Michelle knew the truth, right? 

She knew the reality that she had survived and she knew the details of what they wanted, how they tried to get it out of her, so why did it not feel entirely true? Why did it feel like she was exaggerating at times and downplaying at others and why was she so afraid that maybe, despite _knowing the truth_ she was accidentally lying to these people who wanted nothing more than to help her-- who _had_ done nothing more than save her. 

“They didn’t ever-- I mean, I don’t think they ever, I never saw them--” she floundered. “As far as I knew Morgan stayed in that room the whole time and I-- I did everything I could to make sure it stayed that way, but there’s-- I guess there’s always a chance I was too wrapped up in my own shit to notice? I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make this more complicated.” 

“You’re not,” Natasha said. “We don’t expect you to have a perfect memory.” 

“Yeah, it’s just about getting an outline of what went down,” Sam added. “No pressure, kid, promise.” 

Michelle’s chin wobbled, too emotionally strung out to hold it back any longer as her throat got tight and her eyes started to burn. She nodded, desperate and flailing in her self-enforced stillness until she breathed a little too deeply and it came out in a hiccup of tumultuous grief. 

“Sorry, sorry,” she swiped at her face with a frantic movement of her hand, as if they couldn’t see her openly crying. “I know-- I mean the things you have been through and here I am…” 

She cut herself off with a bitter laugh, but Natasha’s posture released some of its constant tension, leaning forward into Michelle’s space ever so slightly. 

“Yes, we’ve been through a lot,” she said simply. “But the difference is, we signed up for it, Michelle. You didn’t.” 

Michelle met her eye, internalized the empathy she saw there, the kindness and the strength that brought with it, the terrifying understanding. 

“I did though,” she shrugged helplessly. “I did sign up for exactly this.” 

Sam frowned. “What do you mean?”

Michelle breathed deeply, found relief in fresh oxygen and stability in her exhale. 

“We should gather everyone,” she said, pushing her posture upright, clearing her throat. “I only really want to explain this once.” 

*

Michelle had never felt particularly intimidated by the Avengers as a whole. You don’t swing a mace at a murderous drone in high school and not get a little desensitized to the whole superhero complex of a modern world. 

You certainly don’t fall in love with a vigilante a few years later without coming to terms with it. 

But that wasn’t to say that all the pieces weren’t coming together to paint the perfect puzzle of anxiety-inducing _attention_ being bestowed upon her that day. After all, that was what was different about it, the fact that for perhaps the first time, in a room full of heroes, Michelle was the center of attention. 

Peter was sat beside her on the couch in the common room, and when Michelle thought about it, his was really the only gaze that felt thoughtful instead of scrutinous. His was the only that made her feel less like a bug under a microscope instead of more. 

“What we’re trying to do,” Sam explained to the room at large. “Is try to determine identity and motive.”

“Bastards and… being bastards?” Wanda suggested glibly. Michelle thought maybe she had a right to be glib when it came to issues of captivity and torture. 

“Michelle suggested she might have something of a lead,” Natasha said with a nod that had the clear intent of handing over the reins to Michelle. 

And that was the peak of attention she was going to be getting, wasn’t it? All eyes on her, waiting with anticipation for whatever it was they thought she was going to say-- a _lead._

Fuck it.

“It was Ross,” she said, leaving no room for argument. 

Everyone around the room turned to look at her, perhaps because it was the first thing she’d said the entire conversation or perhaps because of what she was insinuating, but all eyes were on her either way. 

“You saw him?” Rhodey asked. 

Michelle shook her head. “No, but I’m positive this was him.”

Realization crossed Peter’s face and leaned forward, elbows on knees. 

“Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, the story. This is what it was about?” 

“I don’t know who, but there’s a mole at the paper,” Michelle explained to everyone’s curious gazes. “We were less than a week out from publishing, there’s-- there’s gotta be a mole.” 

“What were you publishing that would elicit this sort of reaction?” Tony asked, a concern draped across his brow that she wasn’t sure had ever been directed towards her before. It wasn’t quite what she’d expected, the care of Tony Stark. 

“I was about to expose the Raft,” Michelle shrugged, clutching her hands together tight in her lap, tight enough that it hurt. 

“You were…” Tony gaped at her. 

“We all know they’ve been experimenting on enhanced and mutant people for _years,”_ Michelle said. “I just-- I-- I found proof.” 

_“Proof?”_ Rhodey said, nearly disbelieving in the way he was looking at her. “You found _proof_ that Ross has been doing human experimentation at the Raft?” 

Michelle blinked. “Yeah. That’s what I just said.” 

She was always better at one-on-one presentations. 

Tony outright laughed at that, it made something in Michelle’s chest loosen, almost made her want to laugh too. 

“Michelle, do you still have access to this proof?” Pepper asked gently. “Who was your source?”

“I’m not gonna name my source under any circumstances,” she shook her head in response. “And I’m pretty positive Ross’s people have raided my desk by now. My apartment too-- which you all know since May was there and chose not to tell me-- and just, everything I’ve ever had access to, but… Can I?” she motioned to Peter’s phone on the coffee table. 

“Yeah,” he nodded, if not a little quizzical in the way his brow knitted together. 

Michelle picked up the cell phone and pressed the button on the side that enabled Karen. 

“Karen,” she said. “Enabling Protocol: Plan P.” 

“Of course, MJ,” Karen replied easily. “Pulling up encrypted files now.” 

“You hacked my AI?” Peter looked at her, grin tugging at his cheeks. 

“She was very willing to help,” Michelle said. “Very little hacking involved.” 

“A little hacking though,” Peter said, far too pleased for his own good. 

“Shut up, you hack into Friday all the time.”

“I’m sorry, you _what--”_

“Files prepared,” Karen cut in before Tony could properly leap out of his seat. “Where would you like to start?” 

A blue hologram with a series of files with nondescript titles lifted from the screen of the phone and into the air above the coffee table. Michelle swiped through a couple of them before opening one. 

“Contractor documents calling for extreme enhancements to certain rooms.”

She opened another. 

“Money orders from DOD funding directly to one Reverend William Stryker.”

“The Purifiers?” Rhodey muttered, but Michelle just clicked on a video file. 

“And this,” she said, as it began to play. 

The footage was silent, black-and-white and clearly from a security camera in the top corner of a white-walled cell. A man in full body coveralls and a welding mask lifted a blow torch and tried to ignite the walls, the lock on the door, the floor, the ceiling-- nothing so much as showed signs of getting hotter even when the flame was held close for lengthy periods of time. 

At the end of the video, none other than Thaddeus Ross entered the room and pressed his bare hand against where the flame had just been blasting. He pulled it away unharmed and grinned. 

“What is that?” Peter asked hesitantly, as if he already knew what it was. 

“Johnny Storm’s cell,” Michelle said. 

“They _have_ him?”

“Not yet,” she shook her head. “But there’s correspondence in here that suggests they’re planning to, and that they’re prepared to bring in the rest of the team from the Baxter building too.” 

“Em--”

“I warned them already, they know,” she assured Peter, hand on his knee in an attempt to ease the terror in his eyes. 

“That might very well be how Ross found out you knew,” Natasha suggested. “If he was preparing to take down the Fantastic Four, he must have had surveillance on them-- noticed when they started acting differently.” 

“Are you saying there’s not a mole at the paper?” Michelle asked. 

“How many people besides you knew about this story?”

“We kept it close to our chests,” she explained. “My news editor and the EIC were the only two that should have known.” 

“Friday, let’s start background checks on those guys please,” Tony said. 

“On it, Boss.” 

“This stuff is going to be helpful,” Rhodey nodded to Michelle. “But we need to formulate a plan now, fly under the radar with this stuff until we have them.”

Michelle frowned. “I’m still publishing.” 

“What?”

“Fuck you if you think I’m keeping this to myself,” Michelle scoffed, getting more and more heated by the minute. It was the journalist in her as much as it was the victim, the survivor, who needed to be allowed this one thing. 

To tell her truth, whatever that meant anymore.

“Michelle, if you publish you’ll be putting any mission to shut this down at risk,” Rhodey tried to explain pragmatically. “If you tell the world, they’ll know we’re coming.” 

Michelle snorted. “You’re wrong.” 

“Michelle--”

“Let her explain her perspective on this, yeah?” Peter shot a look to the rest of them, effectively shutting them up for the time being. 

Michelle sat up straighter, on the edge of the cushion.

“They kidnapped Tony Stark’s _daughter,”_ her voice was steadily rising in both volume and urgency. “They already know that the Avengers are after them but they don’t give a shit, don’t you see that? They’ve convinced themselves that they’re beyond reproach and if we want to throw them off their game enough to pull this off then we’re gonna have to _scare them._ ”

The attention on her was shifting now, as the people in that room began to discover the parts of Michelle that weren’t for public consumption. The parts that were two parts admirable and one part shameful. The parts that were all _a woman scorned_ and justified anger and moral indignation. 

“You want to pull them out of the shadows,” Tony said, a new cognizance to his posture. “Force them to respond.” 

“What I _want_ is to lock them up in the Hell of their own design and throw away the key,” Michelle said, all composure disregarded in favor of cold fury. “But I’ll settle for a lifetime in a regular prison and global public disgrace.” 

“I know this is unsurprising but, for the record, I agree with her,” Peter said simply and without hesitation. God, he was something else. 

Better than the rest and still on her side, that had to mean something in Michelle’s favor. 

“There is a chance they just go deeper when this comes out,” Tony said. “But I’d love to see the fuckers flounder.” 

He and Michelle shared a quick look across the room. There was a certain kinship in having a vengeful streak as it turned out. 

“How soon can you be ready to post this thing?” Sam asked. 

“Since I’m, y’know, isolated from my editors it’ll take me a few days to get it written and then revised enough to publish.” 

“If you need a second set of eyes,” Pepper offered with a shrug. “I’m not a writer, but I’ve spent enough time interacting with the press that I might be able to act as a sounding board.” 

“Thank you,” Michelle smiled softly at her and earned a look of pride and gratitude that she didn’t deserve in return. 

“Alright,” Rhodey said with a definitive exhale. “Time for the rest of us to figure out what happens after that, then.” 

*

After everyone dispersed, Michelle ended up in the kitchen, perched on a stool with pages of notes she’d been taking the past twenty-four hours strewn out beside her laptop. Typing aggravated her bruised wrists and maybe a chair with a back would be easier on her ribs. 

The space was quiet, save the hum of the refrigerator, and it was making writing difficult. At some point, Michelle had not just gotten used to the hum of a newsroom, but had come to rely on it. Some level of noise distracted the part of her brain that wanted to focus on anything but writing, and allowed the writing bit to take control. 

Silence let her brain fill up with anything and everything going on outside of the story at her fingertips. Silence sent her places she didn’t particularly want to be. 

Which was why when Pepper was passing through with a tired, clearly struggling Morgan attached to her hand, Michelle found she had plenty of reasons to speak up. For all of their sakes. 

“Mo, hey, you got a second?” 

Morgan looked up to Pepper as if for permission, and Pepper offered her an encouraging smile in return. 

“Are you working?” Morgan asked, as she entered the kitchen on hesitant footsteps. 

“Taking a break,” Michelle decided. “Pop a squat, I’ve got something for you.” 

Morgan obediently pulled herself up onto the free stool while Michelle hopped down from hers, winced at a twinge in her side, and opened the refrigerator. 

“What’s in there?” 

“Close your eyes, it’s a surprise,” Michelle said. Something about Pepper’s gaze felt grateful, but Michelle couldn’t quite cope with that yet. The misplaced mother’s love of it all just twisted at her gut and made her trip over her own feet. 

“Is it ice cream?” Morgan asked, palms over her eyes in a signal of blind trust that was equally overwhelming. 

Michelle rolled her eyes and moved back across the kitchen to stand beside Morgan. 

“Alright, open your eyes, Miss Impatience,” she teased. 

Morgan dropped her hands, something like genuine excitement in the way she held herself, in the way her mouth fell open when she looked down, in the way she wrapped her arms around Michelle’s waist and pulled her, stumbling into a tight embrace. 

_“Strawberries,”_ she exclaimed with quiet glee into Michelle’s belly. 

“Hey, I promised, huh?” Michelle vaulted over the ache in her chest in order to reach nonchalance. 

“Mom, MJ got me strawberries!”

“Well, technically I asked Peter who asked your dad who asked _Happy_ who managed to track some down…” 

“I see, hon,” Pepper grinned at Morgan. “Can I have one?” 

“Well, she owes me thirty-four, so these are mine,” Morgan determined quite seriously. “Plus you’re allergic.”

“Oh, right,” Pepper laughed. “My mistake.”

Michelle leaned over conspiratorially to speak into Morgan’s ear. 

“You could probably still share these though,” she whispered. “They’re super out of season and don’t actually taste all that good.” 

Morgan considered this. 

“I’ll share with Dad because I’m a really good daughter,” she said, to the barely contained amusement of both other women in the room. “And Peter too.”

“I’m sure they’ll appreciate that very much,” Pepper said as Morgan took a big bite out of a strawberry and made a dissatisfied face. 

“Bad?” Michelle asked, already picking one up and bringing it to her mouth. She bit down. “Oh, yeah, bad.” 

Morgan laughed at her as she spit it out and drank heavily from her bottle of water. 

Worth it. 

*

Doctor Cho gave Michelle the go ahead to get her stitches wet. She was finally allowed to take a proper shower. 

Shampoos and soaps brought to her from her own apartment, Michelle stood in the bathroom and turned on the tap. She watched the water rushing, pummeling into the basin of the tub for approximately forty-five long, frozen seconds, before abruptly turning the knob all the way off and stepping away. 

Michelle very carefully washed her hair in the sink without getting her face wet and washed her body with a washcloth. 

A problem for tomorrow.

*

Wet hair tied into a braid down the center of her back and slowly soaking her sweatshirt, Michelle stood outside of the room where various Avengers and Peter were discussing-- see, arguing-- over a plan of attack. 

She didn’t remember walking to this hallway or stopping in front of this door, but she knew that her hair was wet and it was soaking through her sweatshirt.

“Hey, I’m making chamomile,” May appeared in front of her, blocking the door from view. “You want some?”

“I… No, thanks,” Michelle shook her head. 

May Parker was not satisfied with that answer, and placed a convincing hand on her arm. 

“Come on, I’m making chamomile.” 

Michelle followed her. 

*

Apparently there were blankets in the Avengers common room, which wasn’t something Michelle had given much consideration in the past, but she figured even superheroes got cold sometimes. 

The sun had set behind the tree line in the distance, and Friday had tinted the windows to shield them from the outside of the building and Michelle was wrapped up in a blanket that belonged to Captain America. 

“You got the job where you don’t get to lean on a team, huh?” May said as she handed over a mug of steaming tea and tucked her feet under her on the couch beside Michelle. 

“I think I’d rather eat dirt than be stuck in that conversation right now,” Michelle responded with a dry chuckle. 

May hummed with a wry smile, maybe in agreement or maybe not, all around dodging Michelle’s out of practice sense of tone. She spent a month assuming that everyone was trying to hurt her as much as possible, so she could feel the bounce back to having any semblance of a trusting nature taking its sweet time. 

“I know you know this, but you have a right to be in there if you want to be,” May said. “You have a right to ask them for anything you need-- to ask Peter.”

Michelle huffed out a tense breath through her nose and pretended the mere thought of it didn’t send her heart into double time. 

“He’s got a bigger job right now than holding my hand,” she said, resigned. 

“He’s sharing that job with about five other superheroes,” May rescinded flatly. “He can take the time to hold your hand if you want him to.” 

“May, I--” Michelle cut herself off with a shake of her head and a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. 

“You wanna tell me what’s going on in that head of yours?”

Michelle hesitated, looked down at her tea, because the fact of the matter was she _did._

Some long forgotten part of her wanted to lay her head down in May’s lap and cry and let this all-knowing powerhouse of a woman just tell her what to do, what the right thing was to _do_. It wasn’t an instinct that she had even remotely entertained since she was probably eleven years old, but on that night, while the ghosts of her past mingled with the pain of her present and the ambiguity of her future, she entertained it. 

“We’ve never done this before May,” she said, begging herself not to choke on the vulnerability of it all. “If it’s-- I mean, I can’t imagine this won’t be too much--”

“You think he’s gonna leave over this?” May gaped at her. 

“No, but I’m wondering if he shouldn’t be considering it,” Michelle chuckled, low and without humor. 

“Michelle, I love you but that’s very stupid.”

“We’ve broken up over less,” Michelle lifted her hands as if to speak with them and let them fall back into her lap. “We’ve broken up over _way_ less on multiple occasions and you know it.” 

“Do you wanna hear what I think?” May asked, and then didn’t wait for confirmation before continuing. “I think that if you want to not be in a relationship right now, then that is completely understandable and no one will fault you for it.”

“But…?”

“But I don’t think that is what you want,” May shrugged. “I think maybe you want to lean on your boyfriend for the first time in your life and that desire is tugging at some deep rooted fear of being too much. So, you’re not asking for what you need and you’re trying to convince everyone that you’re cool and unaffected and that boy of ours is _scrambling_ to do whatever it is that’s going to help you the most, because it hasn’t even crossed his mind that he should be anywhere but right next to you for this whole thing.” 

And the thing was, Michelle hadn’t even realized, hadn’t even _considered_ what it was she wanted until May Parker managed to outline it for her in suffering, accurate detail. Her entire life she had dreaded to _want._

To want softness, to want comfort, to want to be taken care of while the world caught aflame around her. Michelle was self aware enough to realize she was almost independent to a fault, that autonomy having been born from necessity and fear in equal measure. But hadn’t that also always been what she wanted? 

Maybe not. At least, maybe not anymore. 

“He carries so much already,” Michelle said.

“You get to decide what’s too much for you, right?” May replied. “Give him the chance to do the same.” 

*

Peter finally returned to their shared room after Michelle had already changed into her pajamas and tucked herself into bed with a book that she was reading-- of which she had read a paragraph-- of which she was _trying_ to read a paragraph. 

He kissed the top of her head before heading to the bathroom to take a shower, and Michelle couldn’t help but think about the fact that before-- before all of this, before she had been hauled out of her life and dropped unceremoniously into this one-- he wouldn’t have waited until he was in the bathroom to strip down. 

Peter Parker, unselfconscious about his body to a fault, was a casual nudity kind of guy to the point where it was obvious what he was doing, how intentional he was being in not making her uncomfortable. 

Full disclosure, it kind of pissed Michelle off. 

Who was he to assume what would or wouldn’t make her comfortable? Who was he to be so painfully right regarding how she was feeling about her own body, the way she looked in the mirror and felt the broken side of monstrous, the way she didn’t know when she would have claim over it again, if ever? 

Parts of her were still bruised and there was a gash in her thigh still healing and she had this insatiable urge to leave all doors open at all times but her body still belonged to her, did it not? Michelle knew she was not okay and knew she needed time, but still she was stubborn, and so while Peter was in the shower she formulated a very simple plan to feel at home in her own skin once more. 

“What’re you reading?” he asked as he settled under the covers with her, fully clothed and supportive and terrible. 

“Nothing interesting,” she set it aside and resituated her body so she was facing him. “Hey,” she smiled, lifting a hand to his hair and scratching gently with her fingernails behind his ear. 

Peter looked at her quizzically, but leaned into her touch. “Hey.” 

She kissed him. Slow at first, easing him (herself) into it and ignoring the tickle in her brain that kept reminding her this was only the second time they’d kissed on the lips since she had been back, reminding her what her face looked like, reminding her that he’d seen her vomit up a gallon of water on the floor of a concrete room--

“Hey there,” Peter pulled back, an earnest surprise in the lilt of his eyebrows. 

Michelle grinned at him, a breath of a laugh on her tongue and then straight into his mouth when she kissed him again, longer this time, more urgent. She pressed her body up against his as if nothing hurt, put her hand on his thigh because this was as much about him as it was about her. 

“Em,” he pulled away just enough to speak. “I don’t wanna accidentally hurt you.”

“You won’t,” she said, certain and strong and neither of those things. She straddled his hips and began tugging at the hem of his shirt all in one fluid movement. 

It was happening faster then, and Michelle could feel that same gapping lucidity until they were both shirtless in their underwear and her hands were in his hair and she was kissing him, kissing him, kissing him with all she had available. 

And it was good, that closeness with him, the reminder that it wasn’t necessarily lost forever. Peter had always been a solid presence, even as he disappeared into thin air on a regular basis, and she ground her hips down against his to remind her of that fact. 

“Fuck,” he breathed shakily into her warm skin. 

With one had splayed across her back and one at her hip, Peter flipped their positions slowly, gently, and with ease. Michelle breathed into kissing him, pulling him down on top of her, urging him with the eagerness of her hands to lean in, to grab her, to put all that goddamn strength to use. 

She kissed him with a ferocity that she was mostly just trying to convince herself wasn’t lost at the bottom of the sunken well in her chest, sucking at his pulse point and tugging at his earlobe with her teeth and finally, _finally_ Peter started to get the hint. 

Michelle wanted him to stop being passive, she wanted him to stop being afraid of her, she wanted, wanted, _wanted._

He let his body weight fall into hers, let his hips grind down against hers, kissed her with everything he had, bracketed her head with his forearms…

Bracketed her head-- bracketed-- trapped-- trapped her-- trapped her underneath, underneath, underneath--

_“No--”_ she pushed at his chest with both hands, drawing in a ragged breath as he immediately sat back on his heels and made enough space for her to throw herself out of bed. “Christ-- I-- _Christ,”_ she covered her face with her hands out of both humiliation and instability as she slid down the wall to sit curled up on the floor, knees to her bare chest and feeling just about as unsexy as she ever had all too quickly, out of nowhere and there the whole time.

“Em, I’m sorry-- I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Peter, also topless in his underwear kneeled down in front of her but graciously didn’t try to touch her. Michelle whined quietly into her hands because why would he be apologizing? What did Peter have to be sorry for? How had she managed to make him feel guilty while also being the person in the wrong, how did she always fucking _ruin--_

_“I’m_ sorry,” she moved her hands to cover her chest instead, heart thumping uncomfortably behind her ribs, underneath her burning skin. “So stupid-- doesn’t even make any fucking-- _sense.”_

Peter reached behind him and pulled a blanket off of the bed, draping it over Michelle’s shoulders so she could pull it around herself. 

“MJ, it would be surprising if you _weren’t_ a little claustrophobic right now,” he insisted. “Just give yourself a minute, yeah?”

“Yeah-- yeah, yeah,” she took a deep breath, tried to swallow the emotion, only to have it bubble over twofold with a choking sob. 

“Let it out, you’re okay,” Peter touched her shoulder hesitantly, ready to take it back at a moment’s notice, but when she didn’t object started stroking his thumb over the blanket. 

“I want you,” she said through tears. “I _want_ you.”

“I’m right here,” Peter assured her, thumbs carrying away tears before he pressed a kiss to the apple of her cheek. It only made her cry more. 

“No, I--” a frustrated exhale. “I want to lean on you, but I-- I can’t parse out exactly what that means, it’s-- if being close to you isn’t right then how do I figure out what is? I just…”

Peter’s breath hitched, he took a moment, and then--

“You’ve loved me, but you’ve never needed me, that’s okay,” Peter let her fall face first into his chest, let her press her forehead into the hollow of his collar bone. “There’s a learning curve here, but we’re both, like, certified geniuses.” 

Michelle surprised herself with the watery laugh that erupted from her chest and straight into his skin. 

“Listen,” he continued, more serious again. “I know I’m, like, the horniest idiot on the planet, but I don’t want you to feel like I need this from you.” 

“No, I know,” she breathed, because that hadn’t been the real reason she had gone sprinting straight down this path. 

“I’m yours, you know?” he pulled her away from his chest to look her in the eye, gaze full of uncertainty, as if he truly wasn’t sure she knew where they stood. 

“Yeah,” she assured him. “I know.” 

“Okay, good,” he leaned back against the wall beside her and pulled her close to his side so he could press a solid kiss into her temple. 

Michelle leaned into him. 

*

The next morning, while setting up her writing station in the kitchen, Michelle fell down a rabbit hole of articles about how to reclaim one’s body after a major trauma. If she had the passing thought about the computer in the walls that could hear her conversations, she tried not to freak out too much about it and accepted the creepy, if still very kind, advice. 

Then, in some bout of inspiration, she strode into the Avengers gym as though she belonged there, only to come to a screeching halt at the sight of Natasha Romanoff herself in sneakers and a ponytail. 

“If you’re trying to sneak up on me, it’s probably not going to work.”

“Sorry-- I--” Michelle floundered. “Not trying to sneak, promise.”

“I was kidding, kid,” Natasha looked over her shoulder with a careful, intentional smile. 

“Right.” 

“Are you looking for Peter?” she asked, plucking three throwing knives from the target on the wall. 

“No.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Me?”

Michelle forced her fidgeting hands down to her sides, grabbing onto the seams of her leggings to hold them there. 

“I want you to teach me,” she said. “How to defend myself.” 

Natasha’s face was generally pretty unreadable, so something told Michelle that she was being willful in the way her face expressed a quiet surprise, a blooming pride. 

“Have you taken any classes before?”

“Peter tried to teach me how to punch once, but I accidentally broke his nose so we-- stopped doing that,” Michelle said. 

Natasha actually chuckled at that. 

“He probably deserved it.”

“Probably.”

Natasha gave her one final once-over, and then dropped her knives to the side and moved towards the mat in the middle of the room. 

“Come on then,” she said. “Let’s get started.” 

Michelle wasn’t actually all that entirely surprised to find out that Natasha was a good teacher. Good but tough, like the year of ballet that Michelle had done in elementary school when her parents wanted her out of the house a couple afternoons a week. 

The burn in her muscles tugged at still-healing injuries, but Michelle didn’t mind, and the sweat dripping from her hairline gave her a sense of accomplishment that she hadn’t known from physical activity before. 

But the technique of it was what was truly striking. 

It felt like when Michelle’s half-sister was born and Michelle had taken the train to Boston to visit her dad and his new family. She remembered holding the baby and feeling so absolutely conflicted, so abysmally guilty for feeling even the smallest shred of jealousy for that girl, and then the baby had smiled. 

The baby smiled and there was this unbelievable light to it, a love that Michelle hadn’t been exposed to in the first eleven years of her life and thus didn’t quite know how to process. It felt like it might just last forever. 

Of course, it wouldn’t. Michelle wouldn’t see much of little Courtney Jones except for on holidays, and even less once she graduated high school and was able to choose for herself where to go on Christmas. But for a moment there it really did feel good. 

“She’s too young to smile,” her dad had told her then, bursting Michelle’s happy little bubble. “It’s just a reflex.”

“Aren’t all smiles just reflexes?” Michelle had questioned, not understanding the distinction. 

He hadn’t had an answer for her, and she hadn’t been curious enough to bother looking into this _reflex_ nonsense, but she was thinking about it again now on the floor of the gym at the Avengers Compound of all places. 

Because there was technique to Natasha’s fighting style, yes, but there was also a great deal of learned instinct. 

In all of this, the fighting and protecting and escaping, Natasha was an expert. 

And as it turned out, punches, much like smiles, came in many forms. For instance, Michelle now realized there was a difference between how one reflexively reacts to an attack when they’re untrained in combat versus when they are. 

When she had been dragged into the back of a van, her reflex had been to yell and kick and still none of it had done any good. 

Natasha never would have been taken in the first place, not unless she wanted to be. Because Natasha’s reflexes were honed to a fight, honed to know when to punch and when to duck.

But smiling? The correct moment to flash a grin to get someone off your back, the way to react appropriately to polite conversation even when you don’t give a shit, the difference between truth and fiction in a single quirk of the lips? That was Michelle’s territory. 

That was how Michelle had always fought back. 

If she was being honest with herself, it felt good to drop that by the wayside and throw a couple of elbows. 

Maybe a stronger, newer body would make her feel more at home. Maybe, at the very least, it would make her feel safe. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, thanks for reading and your thoughts and feelings are appreciated <3 
> 
> come say hi on tumblr @ premiere-pro if that's your thing


	4. Something of a Rapport

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When their daughter was snatched out of thin air, that was when reality really came crashing in again. Because all at once he had not just let down that little girl, with all her hope and joy and life, but he had also let down that very same boy all over again. 
> 
> And Tony stopped being an early riser that day, quite simply, because he stopped sleeping altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a bit of a Tony POV interlude for you all this week! (I've never written his perspective before so try not to eviscerate me please and thank you) 
> 
> thanks for all your very kind comments and for sticking around, hope you enjoy! <3

Tony Stark had become an early riser sometime in between the world ending and the world starting all over again. 

This lifestyle change could be very easily lined up with the dawning of his fatherhood, but Tony himself wasn’t positive that that’s where it came from. Instead, the theory he held privately was that it had all begun one sunny afternoon when he had been dragged to space in protection of a wizard and a necklace (and a kid who didn’t know when to let go). 

It began with the stunning realization that they might all die in space, and it began with the induction of that very same kid, the personification of the onset of a new era, a boy so eager to help that he hadn’t seen what Tony had seen. 

The inevitability of tragedy. 

And so, after it all ended, Tony began to rise with the sun. Not because anyone needed him, not because anyone was asking him to wake, but because each new sunrise brought with it a broken promise to a faithful boy and the overwhelming compulsion to _make up for it_. 

Tony knew at the time that perhaps he never could, but he kept rising with the morning light and grasping onto a youthful optimism that urged him to help the people that were left, to make their lives, his life, worth whatever force had allowed for their survival. 

Morgan was part of that for him, part of proving his own worth in the creation and protection of a new life amongst so very much death. 

And protect her he had. Tony and Pepper had given Morgan a joyful childhood, a relatively normal childhood, the sort of childhood that both of them had spent lifetimes craving with a messy garden in the back and a kid that was allowed to get covered in dirt and Christmas Eves spent reading stories around a fireplace. 

They loved Morgan for all that she was and prayed she would never understand their insistence on unrestrained happiness. 

When their daughter was snatched out of thin air, that was when reality really came crashing in again. Because all at once he had not just let down that little girl, with all her hope and joy and life, but he had also let down that very same boy all over again. 

And Tony stopped being an early riser that day, quite simply, because he stopped sleeping altogether. 

“Come back to bed,” Pepper mumbled, rolling over to face where he was sneaking out the door. 

“I’ll be back, I just wanna…”

“She’s okay, Tony,” Pepper replied in understanding. “Let her sleep.” 

“I will,” he assured her. “Go back to sleep, Pep.”

Pepper sighed as she watched him leave, but something was compelling Tony down the hall and it had been years since he had been able to ignore that. Everyone knew he had an addictive personality, and he figured they could all mutually agree that being addicted to checking in on his daughter was probably the least harmful way it could present itself. 

So he quietly padded down the hall on socked feet, pushed the door to Morgan’s room open, and--

She wasn’t there. Tony stopped breathing because she _wasn’t in bed._

“Friday--”

“She’s in the common room, Boss,” Friday cut in before he could devolve into a full panic. 

Tony turned on his heel and rushed back the way he had come, pushing back worst case scenarios that he logically knew weren’t possible. If anything had happened, he would have known, there were protocols in place, security-- he would have, would have, _would have known._

He stumbled into the common room to a scene that he hadn’t expected but probably should have. Curled up on the couch was Morgan, sprawled gracelessly out on top of Michelle Jones. 

A breath in, slowing down as he exhaled in sync with their deep-sleep breathing. 

Part of him, a bigger part than he would have willingly admitted, wanted to wake the both of them up and make sure everything was okay. He wanted to pull his daughter into his chest and he wanted to ask Michelle what her wildest dreams were so that he could bankroll them right then and there.

Was he jealous that Morgan was seeking comfort from someone other than her parents for the first time in her life? Not so much that he wasn’t also grateful for her safety, for the fact that Michelle was willing and able to hold Morgan’s hand when Tony could not. He was evolved and shit. Fatherhood did that to a man. 

The blanket draped atop them had fallen slightly off of the couch, so Tony crossed the room to gently tuck them back in, pressed a feather light kiss to the top of Morgan’s hair, and then settled down in the recliner across from them. 

Tony fell asleep there, comfortable in knowing his own light sleeping would react to an emergency as fast, if not faster, than all the multimillion dollar security systems put in place. 

*

He woke up to Morgan crawling into his lap. 

“Dad, you’re not supposed to sleep in chairs because your back,” she whispered, which was how Tony knew that Michelle was still asleep on the couch across from them. 

“Says who?” Tony helped her situate herself more comfortably and rubbed at his bleary eyes. 

“Says _Mom,_ ” Morgan rolled her eyes. 

“Hmm, guess I should probably get up, huh?” he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted them both out of the chair with a groan. Yeah. He wasn’t supposed to sleep in chairs _because his back._ “Come on, it’s probably close enough to breakfast time for cereal.” 

He looked over his shoulder as he pushed Morgan towards the kitchen, catching Michelle as she rolled over in her sleep, wrapped the blanket up in her arms as if still holding a person against her chest. 

She probably wouldn’t accept a castle in the Scottish Highlands… right?

*

“Peter’s not gonna be mad at me, right?”

Tony balked, coffee halting halfway to his mouth where he sat across from Morgan at the kitchen table. 

“Why would Peter be mad at you, kiddo?”

“I woke them up and made MJ come sit with me,” she explained, stirring her spoon in her bowl of cereal with a lethargy that Tony knew too well, that shouldn’t have a home in the bones of his daughter. 

“I think you’ll find Michelle doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Tony cocked his head at her, tried to meet her eye. 

“Still woke them up,” Morgan grumbled. “I mean, Peter pretended to be asleep but I think he just didn’t want to embarrass me.” 

“I’m pretty certain Peter’s not mad at you, but I can talk to him if you want me to?”

Morgan hesitated, and then nodded shallowly before shoveling a spoonful of cinnamon toast crunch into her mouth. 

“Everything else okay, though?” Tony continued. “Anything you want to talk about?”

“Do we have any oranges?”

The non sequitur slapped Tony in the face, but there was a brightness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before so he was willing to roll with it. 

“Yeah, probably a couple,” he nodded. “You want one?” 

“No, it’s for MJ,” Morgan explained simply, as if that was all he needed to know on the subject. 

“Fair enough.” 

*

Tony was back in his armchair, scrolling through his tablet absentmindedly while Morgan was off getting bathed and dressed by Pepper when Michelle finally groaned herself awake. 

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” Tony commented as Michelle pushed herself to a sitting position and blew a mess of tangled curls out of her face. 

“You watching me sleep?” she deadpanned. 

“Catch,” Tony ignored the question and underhand tossed an orange across the small lounge space. 

“What the--” Michelle fumbled but still managed to grab ahold of the flying fruit before it hit her in the face. 

“A gift from my daughter,” Tony explained and that finally made Michelle’s eyes open into true wakefulness. 

“Oh,” she said, suddenly smaller in voice and stature as she stared at the orange as if it contained some higher meaning that Tony simply couldn't understand. He supposed it probably did. 

“She’s gotten very concerned with scurvy since you two got back,” he said, nodding to the fruit held carefully in Michelle’s hands. “Real invested in getting some more oranges around here.” 

Michelle expelled a sharp laugh and then immediately composed herself into a sheepish countenance and posture. 

“That… might be my fault,” she said apologetically, and Tony just looked at her with confusion. 

“Really?”

“We kind of have an ongoing debate about whether strawberries or oranges are better,” she shrugged as she used her fingernails to start removing the peel from the fruit in question. 

“Strawberries. Obviously.”

“Ah,” Michelle lifted a brow at him. “So, bad taste is genetic, then.” 

Tony stood and shoved gently at her shoulder as he passed her-- realizing only as he did it that it was the kind of interaction he would have with Peter or Morgan, but had never quite felt comfortable indulging in with Michelle. 

For as long as he’d known her, there had been a wall of her own design built up between them, and even their mutual care for Peter Parker hadn’t been able to tear it down. But there was a new understanding now, where that wall had once stood, an acceptance of eternal connection, maybe even of family. 

Tony found he wouldn’t mind joining the exclusive list of Michelle Jones’ trusted confidantes. 

“Here,” she handed him a wedge of orange, and when he looked at her quizzically said, “Delivery fee.” 

He took the offered slice and popped it in his mouth with a smirk, but couldn’t quite identify the feeling in his chest. Tony Stark’s love language had a lot to do with giving, whether that be extravagant gifts or a homemade dinner. There weren’t many people that were so casual in the things they offered in return, as though they were afraid anything they gave him wouldn’t meet his rich boy standards. 

It had been a long time since someone had offered him a single slice of fruit. 

“I’m gonna get dressed before your boyfriend shows up and mocks my pajamas,” he said, instead of even remotely alluding to any of that. “Shout if you need anything.” 

“Not much of a shouter,” she deadpanned as she watched him leave.

“Friday’s calibrated to pick up your emo kid mumble, don’t worry.” 

He relished in the snort of a laugh that garnered. 

*

Shortly after he had changed and said good morning to Pepper, Tony found himself leaning in the doorway to the Parker-Jones guestroom. 

Originally, it had just been Peter’s room at the Compound. It was where he kept a handful of things for when he needed to stay more than a day or two, but after a mere handful of visits from Michelle, Tony had begun to think of it as _their_ room, which was maybe jumping the gun a little on a relationship that had ended for more arbitrary reasons than he could understand in his exasperated old age, but was his instinct nonetheless. 

Over time, he’d ordered extra towels for their bathroom, more storage space, and consistently acted like he had nothing to do with it when Peter asked what was going on. 

He was a romantic. Sue him. 

“Rough night?” Tony asked casually as he watched Peter laboriously pull on a pair of socks, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking for all the world like he hadn’t slept a wink. 

“I’m too tired to go seven rounds with you,” Peter leaned back on his hands and looked at Tony. “Do you need something?” 

“Ooh, grumpy morning,” Tony made a face at him. “Wanna talk about it?”

“Tony…”

So, something emotionally exhausting had happened but Peter wasn’t going to talk about it. Tony could hold his simultaneous concern and curiosity back. 

“I just wanted to apologize for Morgan waking you up,” Tony let all the teasing drop from his tone. 

“What? Oh-- She-- No, Tony she’s fine,” Peter looked almost offended at the thought that he would be bothered by Morgan’s visit to his room in the early hours of the morning. 

“You sure?” Tony asked. “Because you look like a guy whose girlfriend snuck out of bed to hang out with a ten-year-old, which is to say, grumpy.” 

“Should I talk to her? I really-- I’m just--” Peter let out a frustrated breath. “I’m just still figuring all of this out but I’m not upset with either of them, I swear.” 

“I know you’re not, bud,” Tony said sympathetically. 

“Honestly I think Michelle needed Morgan last night as much as the other way around,” he said. “It’s-- It shouldn’t be Mo’s responsibility, but I am grateful for her.”

“Hey, what do we not do with _shouldn’t be’s?”_ Tony prompted. 

“We don’t hyperfixate on them,” Peter said with well-practiced exasperation. 

“Or else we’ll…?”

“Lose our entire fucking minds.”

“Thank you for attending Tony Stark’s mental health seminar,” Tony pushed off the doorframe and walked out of the room. “We appreciate your patronage!” 

Peter snorted loudly behind him. 

“Applying for a refund, old man!” 

*

Morgan threw a tantrum over nothing. 

She screamed and she cried and she threw her little fists into Tony’s chest and he just let her. He let her and spoke softly to her and reminded himself that they could go back to the city and get them all proper therapy once the mess was handled, once it was safe for them to be out in the open again. 

But for the moment, his daughter was sobbing and she was too young to fully comprehend what had set her off, to be able to communicate if anything specific was overwhelming her or if it was just one of those moments when it all became too much. 

Eventually Morgan wore herself out enough to fall asleep in her mother’s lap and Tony pressed a fierce kiss to his wife’s temple as they both caught their breath and reoriented themselves in the quiet. 

It wasn’t until Pepper dozed off as well that Tony stepped into the nearest bathroom and silently cried. 

*

He went to his lab, not to run away from his life because he was certainly too old for that, but instead in search of one Michelle Jones. 

“She’s locked herself up down there to write and I’ve checked on her, like, kind of a crazy number of times already,” Peter had explained when he had asked Tony to drop in on her, make sure she wasn’t self destructing. 

Tony agreed, of course. It gave Morgan a chance to spend some time with Peter which Tony would always endlessly support and he wasn’t going to pretend that the fact that Michelle had no family checking in on her hadn’t broken his heart every day since she had disappeared. 

Michelle was set up at one of the workbenches at the far end of the room, staring with a dissatisfied tilt of her head at the laptop in front of her. She looked just as exhausted as she did determined, and Tony started to understand why Peter was imploding a little bit upstairs. 

She didn’t even look up when he entered as if she didn’t notice there was suddenly a whole entire person in the room with her. 

“Working hard or hardly working?” Tony asked. He saw Michelle startle, but pretended that she covered it up as well as _she_ was pretending to. 

She snorted and looked him up and down. 

“The dad vibes are at an all time high today, huh?” 

_Why, you need a parental sort of hug? I’m a pro at the parental sort of hug._

“You mind if I work in here for a little while?” Tony asked. “Not gonna mess with your journalistic integrity?” 

“Yeah,” Michelle shrugged. “Go ahead and tinker. I’ll just be over here, y’know, exposing the Secretary of State for war crimes.” 

Tony barked a laugh as he picked up a random half-finished project to mess around with for the next hour or so before he forced her to walk away from her work and get something to eat. 

They worked in a companionable silence for half an hour before Tony started to get restless, because although he’d worked hard to discover the benefits of patience, he was still far from a patient man at heart. 

So he set down his tinkering for a moment and turned to look at Michelle. 

“You good if I play some music in here?” he asked. 

“Yeah, actually,” she nodded at him, seeming almost grateful for the suggestion to cut the silence. 

“You heard the boss, Fri.”

The eruption of loud music throughout the lab eased some of Tony’s unspent energy as he turned back to the project on his workbench and got back to tinkering. He leaned into the beat and tapped his foot and was all around beginning to enjoy himself halfway through the first song when he turned around.

Michelle was gone. 

Tony froze and furrowed his brow at the pile of Michelle’s things still strewn across the entirety of the workbench she’d been seated at, the empty space where she had been sitting just moments before. 

He was about to ask Friday where the young woman had gone when he spotted a pair of scuffed up chucks poking out from beneath the surface of the table. It took him longer than it should have to realize what was going on, but the moment he was close enough, ducked down to notice she had tucked her head between her knees and squeezed her eyes shut, his idiot brain caught up to the situation at hand. 

“Friday, cut the music now,” he said tersely as he crouched down on the floor directly in front of Michelle. 

At the abrupt quiet, she just shrunk in further on herself, muscles trembling with the effort of keeping them tense. Tony’s heart was breaking, it was broken. 

“Michelle, I’m sorry-- What do you need?” he began gently, but when she didn’t respond, just whimpered into her knees, he lifted a hand to place on her shoulder. “Hey, you with me, kiddo?”

The moment that his hand made contact with her, she threw herself to the ground and covered her head and started sobbing. 

“Please-- Please, please, please--”

“Okay, okay,” Tony moved away from her by a few inches. “You’re not here right now, that’s alright, we can figure this out.” 

He sat down with his hands in his lap and took a deep breath, gathered all of the emotional intelligence he had learned from years of trauma and subsequent therapy and promised himself that he wasn’t going to fuck this up. 

“Let’s just remember where we are, okay?” he began. “You’re Michelle Jones-- very talented reporter and all around cool kid-- and I’m Tony Stark. Now, I know what you’re thinking-- you don’t like Tony Stark all that much, but I like to think we’ve been building something of a rapport lately, y’know? You’re in my lab-- you can feel the concrete underneath you, I’m sure. It’s cold and maybe a little dustier than it should be, but that’s fine-- it’s a workshop after all.” 

He continued speaking, keeping his voice low and steady as he described their surroundings, using every grounding technique he could remember in the hopes that one of them worked well for Michelle’s particular experience. It took probably close to twenty minutes, but he could see her breathing level out, and she stopped begging with the ghosts of her trauma in broken sobs of _please, please, please_ so Tony could tell they were making progress. 

And then she took a fortifying breath and uncovered her face to look at Tony’s shoes. Flushed and shaken and obviously embarrassed, she didn’t seem to want to meet his eye. 

“Hey, you back?” Tony asked gently. 

Michelle squeezed her eyes shut and then hauled herself up to a sitting position with a quiet but heartfelt _fuck._

“The music?” Tony questioned.

“Yeah,” she wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket harshly. “It was-- they--they--”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” he cut her off graciously. 

“Thank you,” she murmured, and he could tell it was an all-encompassing gratitude, one that he wasn’t sure he had earned but would accept nonetheless, not wanting to discredit how serious it was that he had seen her so vulnerable. 

“Of course, kid.” 

“I’m-- I promise if it had anything to do with Morgan I would--” she shook her head. “I would tell you. But she-- I mean she went through hell and I couldn’t-- couldn’t save her from all of it, but she didn’t have to do-- not _that._ I swear.” 

“Don’t worry about that,” Tony insisted. “You protected her and I’m always gonna be grateful for that.”

“I-- I didn’t,” she pushed back tearfully. “She’s still hurting so much. I want to show her it’s-- that it’ll be okay, but I’m still…” she motioned vaguely to herself with a bitter twist of her lips. 

“Morgan’s gonna bounce back from this just fine,” Tony insisted. “And so are you.” 

“Morgan’s young.”

“So are _you,”_ he reiterated, because he couldn’t tell exactly what she meant by that. 

Michelle’s face twisted up at him. “You know what I mean. She’s still-- She’s _ten._ She’s still-- elastic.” 

Tony took a deep breath, settled in on the floor for the long haul and accepted that his back was just going to have to be fucked. This kid needed the kind of advice that he was especially capable of offering and nothing was going to stop him from giving it. 

“Kid, I was in my forties when I got blown up and held captive in a cave,” he said, blunt but not without a certain kindness. 

“I-- I didn’t mean--”

“No, hey, I’m just trying to prove something to you, okay?” he cut off what was clearly going to be a guilt spiral to rival one of his own. “I was twenty years older than you are now, and when I got back I thought that was just-- you know, the rest of my life, right? The fear and the anxiety and the way it fucks with every aspect of everything?”

“Yeah,” Michelle said, jaw trembling. 

“Well, spoiler alert, but it wasn’t,” he shook his head, sympathy in the quirk of his lips. “Of course it doesn’t just go away, but if emotionally stunted, son of a bitch Tony Stark could find his way back to solid ground, then I know Michelle fucking Jones can.” 

Michelle sniffed hard, but she couldn’t hide the fat tears that rolled down her cheeks caused, if he had to guess, but his unyielding faith in her. He had reacted the same way, years ago when Rhodey had looked at him without a single doubt of his continued survival. 

“Hey, question,” she said wetly. “Would it be weird if I hugged you? I don’t know if-- we’re there yet.” 

How many times could his heart break for this girl before it started to become physically detrimental to his health? 

“Oh, we’re there,” he said, scooting closer to her so he could wrap an arm around her shoulders and place a gentle hand at the nape of her neck. 

Michelle’s breath hitched as she leaned into him, arms around his middle and face buried in his shoulder. It was hesitant at first, but the longer he held onto her without any signs of letting go, the tighter she pressed herself against him, the easier she breathed. 

Tony decided right then and there that not only would he make sure that Michelle Jones got hugged as often as she wanted, but that he would never be the first to let go. 

Someone along the line had been neglecting her of this, he could tell because of the way she seemed to be starving for it, the way it was exactly how he had felt in his young adulthood. Tony wasn’t going anywhere though. 

And he was never going to let go first. 

*

When he led Michelle upstairs with an arm around her shoulders and sat her down at the kitchen table, he was immediately bombarded by the fearful, buzzing energy of Peter meeting his eye from across the room, a question of _what happened_ dangling in between them. 

Tony mouthed a simple _we’re okay_ and got to work on making lunch. 

*

Michelle Jones, not one to be stopped by a breakdown of any sort, trudged her way back to work the moment she had what the rest of them determined to be a sufficient amount of food and water in her stomach. 

She locked herself up in her and Peter’s bedroom this time, presumably because she thought people were less likely to interrupt her in there which was, honestly, fair enough. They didn’t see her for hours after that, and slowly but surely, more and more of the team found their way into the common room, sprawled out across the couches and rugs and pretending as though their victory was both imminent and inevitable when they all knew it was neither. 

“I’m gonna run through it one more time for everyone.”

“Sam, I swear to God we know the plan-- I swear on my fucking-- family plot in Queens that I know the plan,” Peter snapped. No one blamed him, least of all Tony. The kid was more stressed over this mission than he had been over his fights with any of New York’s greatest enemies in the previous few years. 

It had been a while since one got this personal for him. 

“Humor me anyway?” Sam requested. “For everyone else’s sake?” 

Peter worked his jaw, but fell back against the couch and crossed his arms in some version of concession. 

“We’ve still got eyes on Ross,” Natasha began without having to be asked. “We’ll coordinate with Michelle so that when the first copy of her story drops, we’re in position to bring him in immediately. Our best option for holding and questioning is here with the Compound’s extra security at which point the United States government will get involved and we can bring in Tony’s army of lawyers. Did I miss anything?” 

“You missed the part where I deck Thaddeus Ross in his stupid fucking face,” Peter mumbled. 

_Same, kid._

A smirk itched at the corner of Natasha’s mouth. “Right, I forgot. Make sure we don’t let these two bozos near our guy or he’ll get off on some sort of technicality.” 

Peter got somehow even more restless at that comment, knee bouncing rapidly as he refused to look any of them in the eye. 

“Pete--”

“I’m gonna go check on Em,” he said as he abruptly stood. 

“She asked to have time to write,” Rhodey chimed in, ever the mediator. 

“I know, I’ll just-- I’ll be right back,” Peter floundered before striding out of the room and down the hall. 

“That’s not going to go well for him,” Wanda said flatly. Tony snorted. 

“Y’know, I think you’re probably right about that,” he agreed. 

Sure enough, a prompt seven minutes later had Peter falling back down into his seat on the couch, cheeks slightly more flushed than they had been before. 

“Went well, huh?” Tony poked at him. 

“I got lectured,” Peter sighed, slumping low on the couch and perfectly filling the baby-of-the-group spot with ease. 

“Did you deserve it?” Natasha smirked at him. 

“I mean, obviously,” Peter threw his hands up and let them fall heavily into his lap, much to the amusement of everyone. “Don’t laugh at me!” he whined as everyone, well, laughed at him. 

*

Time passed. The sun began to set. 

The Avengers remained where they were seated, as though waiting for something, as if they knew their time was drawing nearer. 

*

“I’m not asking you to tell us, but has she really not told you who her source for this shit is?” Tony asked. 

Peter shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “She takes stuff like this really seriously, which like, makes sense since whoever stole those documents could probably face pretty major backlash.” 

“I’d like to shake their hand,” Sam said. “Brave motherfucker.” 

They continued to chat casually, but Tony was uncharacteristically quiet as he sat there and watched them all. These people carried with them stories beyond what he had once believed possible. They carried a strength, not just in the way they knew how to fight but in the way they never truly left any of it behind. 

It was what scared him the most for Peter, that potential for holding on too tight to the hurt in a man who cared so deeply to begin with, who didn’t need any added _feeling_ on top of everything already digging into his shoulders. 

It scared him for Morgan and Michelle now too, with their big hearts and moral drives. 

Maybe that’s what growing up had really done for Tony though, given him the ability to be scared, actually and sincerely afraid, and to not be debilitated by it. He worried for his people, because of course he did because he loved them, but he had a relatively new trust in them, in himself, that they could survive past the adversity in their way. 

This was what he was thinking about when Michelle Jones appeared in the room, laptop in hand and sleeves of her borrowed sweatshirt rolled up high around her elbows. 

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, light from the screen of her laptop illuminating her face from the bottom up and highlighting the yellowing bruise on her cheek. There was something hanging around her posture that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. 

Or maybe something was gone, something heavy, something that had been slowing her down. 

“Not interrupting,” Tony said. “Can we help with something?” 

“I’m… I…” she looked down at her laptop and visibly gathered herself before turning her gaze up to meet the group of them again. “I’m looking for a proofreader.” 

A stillness filled the room and a buzzing Tony’s ears as understanding swept across the whole lot of them and brought them back to the reality they were living. Not the hypothetical, not the lighthearted familial charade they’d been playing, but a battle. A full on war against injustice, headed by the young, terrified woman before them. 

“You’re ready for-- for a proofreader?” Peter asked, looking like the only thing keeping him in his seat and away from the urge to cross the room and carry Michelle away from it all was his overpowering respect for her. 

They all knew what it meant. They all knew that this was the reason they had been deliberating for days instead of acting. They all knew the next move across the board. 

“Yeah,” Michelle breathed. She knew too. “I’m ready.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love you all, thanks for reading, come say hi in the comments or on tumblr @ premiere-pro! <3


	5. Recalibrating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He said, “I love you too,” and ran a thumb across her knuckles as she pulled herself closer. 
> 
> “I think,” her voice stumbled over the words. “I think I need help.”
> 
> “Okay.”
> 
> “Like, professional help,” she admitted into his back, into the warmth of him, the softness of his shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's a posting schedule again? anyway here's this!

“Hey, don’t call me back here I still don’t have a phone of my own, just-- Please don’t do anything stupid. This is all about to blow up and I need you to not be stupid about it, alright? Keep your head down. I’ll call you later.” 

*

Pepper Potts and May Parker both would have made pretty brilliant copy editors in another life. 

They were tough but kind, they took every aspect of it seriously, they helped Michelle to double and triple check her facts because they understood the importance of this, understood that good journalism didn’t happen in a vacuum. And neither did truth. 

Michelle had been phenomenally forthcoming in the story she had written, not only about the travesties she was uncovering, but about what had been done to her when she tried to hold the people responsible accountable for their crimes against humanity. 

It was new, this earnestness in her writing, having dived headfirst into journalism with the intention of telling other people’s stories, of giving a voice to those who needed to be heard most of all. Never in her life had she considered that one day, some long time away in a world where she was so lonely and so loved, that Michelle herself would be one of those voices. 

It was, perhaps, the most vulnerable she had ever been. It was perhaps, the most honest. 

It was perhaps, the most terrified. 

“Okay,” Pepper said from her spot at the massive conference table they had commandeered. “The B section looks ready to go, it just needs one final pass by you, Michelle.” 

“Awesome.”

“And section C just has that spot where we were flipping a couple paragraphs around,” May added, flipping through the marked-up draft in her hands. “Other than that…” 

Michelle leaned back in her chair, not with the relief of weight from her shoulders, but simply the shifting of it. 

“Thank you,” she looked up from the table and all the heft of story it held to look Pepper and May in the eyes. “Both of you, really. It’s-- I’m glad I didn’t have to sift through this thing on my own.” 

They had decided to keep Morgan’s involvement under wraps, so the feat had mostly involved inserting Michelle’s own perspective of her month in captivity, and tying it into the work she had been doing leading up to her kidnapping-- the documents and evidence she had managed to gather. 

“You’ve written something truly-- just so special,” Pepper said. She had maintained a brave face for the entirety of the editing process, but Michelle could see the cracks in it, the spaces between the strength where she held all of her heartbreak for the daughter who would be forever changed by these things. Maybe that was why she was so insistent on helping, because of all the ways Michelle knew she felt lacking in pulling Morgan back to her feet. “You should be very, very proud.” 

“I don’t know,” she exhaled heavily in response. “I think we have to see if it works, first.” 

Michelle had read it once, or maybe she had seen it in an old Russian movie she couldn’t remember the name of anymore-- this sentiment that it was the things that went unspoken that we remember the longest. 

Something about nostalgia, about how there is no way to properly translate art, about homesickness, and about how we do not ever forget the things we do not say. 

If that was true, and some part of Michelle hoped that it was, then everything she had immortalized in ink and paper, in vocabulary and sentiment, in facts and figures and that splash of ethos that kept people reading, would eventually fade away. 

If that was true, then Michelle hoped she was saying it loud enough to count. She hoped that the story would remain in people’s minds but that her name would dissipate from the conversation. She hoped that one day, someday, she could finally leave it all behind. 

“One more thing,” May began with a hint of reluctance. “What you’re doing here, Michelle, it’s incredibly brave but also incredibly honest. I just-- I want to make sure you’re positive that you don’t want to talk to your parents before this thing goes online.” 

“Right,” Michelle said. She lifted a hand and pulled absentmindedly at her lips. 

Because May had a point but Michelle had very much been putting off this particular line of thought again and again and again in the interest of actually finishing the story set before them. They had a right to know, her parents, did they not? 

They weren’t simple people and her relationship with them was flawed, but did that mean they no longer deserved the work Michelle had been doing her entire life of giving them a soft place to land? This felt like new territory, simply given that Michelle had always been a mediator between her mother and father but never between herself and them. 

She had never before needed to explain herself or her life to them because if there were things she didn’t want them to know, she would just choose not to tell them. There had always been a gentleness to the way she spoke to her parents, but this story at this point in her life with everything that came along with it-- there was nothing gentle about it. 

“I know that I can’t-- I don’t know your specific situation here,” Pepper said, clearly sensing Michelle’s reluctance. “But I do know what it’s like to grow up and the-- _freedom_ that comes with having the power to decide when you do and do not want to see or speak to your parents. But if there was ever a time…” 

Michelle didn’t know a lot about Pepper’s past, but something about the way she said this was telling enough that she believed Pepper really did understand. There was something about having difficult parents that bled out into the way a person talked about family. 

Peter’s life had been a string of death and trauma, and Michelle would never deny that, but his pain came from having lost the people that he loved, the people that loved him back with vigor, and in the same way Michelle would never understand that, he would also never understand where she had come from. 

It made her feel guilty sometimes, the fact that she couldn’t be grateful for the parents she still had when good, _great_ people like the Parkers had been hemorrhaging family for nearly twenty years, but Pepper was saying _if there was ever a time_ and Michelle was hearing her. Because she believed she understood. 

“I know,” Michelle said, because she did, because she was growing tired of how well she knew. “I just-- don’t know how to have this conversation with them.” 

“You don’t have to explain anything in detail to them,” Pepper leaned in towards Michelle. “If they want the full story it’s going to be available. But it might be worth giving them a heads up that your name is about to be in the news, just so not warning them doesn’t end up blowing up in your face even worse.” 

Michelle was practiced at not telling her parents things. She hadn’t told them when she quit one job and started another. She hadn’t told them when she broke up with Peter or got back together with him. She hadn’t told them when she almost got evicted from her apartment and had to get a second job to pay her rent. 

Because once upon a time she had shared those types of life moments with them, and they hadn’t shown signs of caring. 

This was something different though, because maybe Pepper was right and maybe this was as much about protecting herself as it was them. Maybe, this was the understanding that they didn’t deserve, but that she wanted to do it anyway. 

“Yeah,” Michelle nodded to herself. “Yeah, okay.” 

“Do you want us to stick around while you talk to them?” May asked. “We’d be happy to.” 

“No, that’s alright,” Michelle said. “But could I-- Would it be alright if I came and found you? Um, after?” 

May reached out and squeezed her hand. 

“Whatever you need.”

*

When she was thirteen years old, less than two years after her parents got divorced, little Michelle Jones had called her dad to tell him that she had been accepted to Midtown’s scholarship program. 

He hadn’t picked up and she hadn’t wanted to tell him via a voicemail, so she left him a message asking him to call her back. She said that it was important, that she had good news, that she couldn’t wait to tell him. 

The next time Michelle spoke to him was three weeks later, and he acted like he hadn’t gotten her message even though Michelle knew that he had, knew it in her heart. 

She decided to call her mom. 

*

It was good that Michelle had her mother’s phone number committed to memory, because she was borrowing Peter’s phone again. 

Borrowing Peter’s phone and not telling him why again. Not telling him why and praying that he trusted her again. 

For a moment, it felt like it had been ringing long enough that Eloise Watson was going to let her go to voicemail. 

It rang, and Michelle’s heart stuttered. 

It rang, and she paced the length of the bedroom. 

It rang, and she contemplated hanging up altogether. 

It rang. 

“Hello?”

Michelle’s breath caught in her throat and she forced herself to stop pacing, to stand still as she held one arm tight around her ribs. 

“Hello? Is someone there?”

“Hi, uh-- Hi, Mom, it’s me,” she cleared her throat to rid it of all that excess emotion that she didn’t want bleeding into their conversation. 

“Michelle? Oh, sweetheart, it’s been ages since you called,” Eloise said. “Do you need something?”

She lifted herself on the balls of her feet and then let her heels thud back down against the floor, trying not to balk at the insinuation that she only called her mother to ask for things when she hadn’t asked either of them for help since she was--

“No, no, nothing like that,” she cut off her own internal tirade. “I just-- Wanted to tell you something if you’ve got a minute?” 

“Are you trying to be ominous?” Eloise snorted. “Because you’re being ominous, Michelle.”

“There’s about to be some stuff in the news,” Michelle barreled onwards. “Stuff that includes me, and I just wanted to-- to warn you about it.” 

“What did you do?”

Michelle breathed. “I can’t tell you any details until the story comes out,” she said. “And you can’t talk to anyone about it either, Mom, I’m serious.” 

“Talk about what?” Eloise asked accusatorily. “You haven’t even told me anything.”

“I-- Something happened,” she was choking on the words. She hadn’t needed to explain it to anyone yet-- not someone who was so unaware of the life she’d been living for a month and a half. “Something happened and it’s a big deal.”

“Michelle, sweetheart,” said the patronizing voice on the other end of the line. “You’re doing that thing where you talk but don’t actually say anything.”

It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t get it, it wasn’t fair for Michelle to blame her for that, but God did she hate it, hate it, _hate it._

“I was kidnapped, Mom,” she blurted out without really thinking too hard about it. “I was held captive for a full month and it’s going to be in the news, so I didn’t want you to read about it before you heard from me. That’s all I called to say.” 

“Jesus Christ,” Eloise said, more perturbed than concerned. “You were _kidnapped?_ What does that even mean?”

“It means I was kidnapped,” Michelle laughed with a bitter, exasperated shrug. 

“Don’t laugh at me, you’re just--” Eloise huffed in frustration. “I mean, who would kidnap you? What did they want?”

“Those are the details I can’t tell you yet.” 

“I can’t believe-- I would have known, Michelle,” she pushed back. “Why wouldn’t anyone have told me?”

“There were questions of-- security,” Michelle explained. “It wasn’t-- This is why I’m telling you _now.”_

“I assume you’re okay now if you’re calling me?” Eloise asked. “Whose phone are you using anyway? You didn’t show up on caller ID.”

“I’m borrowing a friend’s,” she said, really standing at the precipice of her patience. 

“And you’re _okay?”_

“I’m safe, I promise.” 

“Not that I can believe that since no one even told me you were unsafe to begin with.”

“Mom, this is-- It’s bigger than both of us, I wasn’t trying to fucking _slight you.”_

“Forgive me,” Eloise said flatly. “Sometimes it can be difficult to tell with you.”

“I need you to call Dad and tell him,” Michelle said, officially past being gentle and just wanting to be able to hang up already. 

“I’m sorry-- That’s-- No, Michelle,” her mother blustered. “This is something you tell him yourself.”

“Quite frankly I don’t care what you think I’m supposed to do,” Michelle laughed bitterly. “I don’t have time to argue this with you.”

“Do you realize how long it’s been since you called?” was the snapped response. “And you just-- drop this on me and ask me to do you a favor all in the same breath?”

“A lack of communication goes both ways,” Michelle huffed. 

“Oh, you don’t get to put that on my shoulders,” her mother argued. “The minute you turned eighteen you were out of this house faster than I could wish you a happy birthday!” 

“And I went missing for a month and you didn’t fucking notice, Mother!” Michelle covered her face with her hand, immediately regretting her outburst and not knowing how to take it back, how to rescind something that was simply there and real and true. 

She had never really known how to be honest with her mother, had even gotten in trouble for it quite a number of times when she was a teenager, but it nearly always had to do with this. The detriment of honesty between two people who could not see the world from the other’s point of view, who could not see their _relationship_ from the other’s point of view. 

“Well.”

Silence. An ache deep in Michelle’s chest where she thought she had outgrown it. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly small. 

“I’m sure you are,” her mother replied, the biggest woman she would ever know. 

“Will you please tell Dad for me?” Michelle pleaded. “I really don’t have time, that wasn’t-- I’m not calling to start a fight with the two of you, I just wanted-- I don’t know. I wanted you to not be blindsided.” 

“If that’s what you wanted, you would be doing a lot of things differently, Michelle,” Eloise said. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Mom--”

_Click._

Michelle chucked the phone at the mattress in the middle of the room and watched it bounce, tumble to the floor, grateful for Peter’s self-designed, shatterproof phone even as she continued to fume. 

It had been years since she last thought about her family and thought the word _unfair,_ but talking to her mother always made her feel younger, less powerful, lacking any sort of personal autonomy. Plus, it _was_ unfair. 

It was deeply, painfully, fucking unfair that she had managed to survive, managed to not get anyone else hurt in the meantime, had found the guts to now tell the world about what she had been through after barely any time had passed and still-- still she was thirteen years old and begging for someone to be proud of her. 

“Miz Jones,” Friday’s voice startled her out of her own anger. “Would you like for me to call someone for you?” 

“No,” was Michelle’s strong and immediate response. “No, thank you, Friday.” 

She was angry and she was buzzing with it. She was small and weak and desperate to prove herself otherwise. 

So she took the option most available to her in the moment, stripped off her shirt, and strode into the bathroom. 

Michelle Jones was going to take a fucking shower and she wasn’t going to be a fucking baby about it anymore. 

*

At the end of the day, it was the water in her face that was the problem, or so Michelle had contrived from how it felt to stand there and stare at the rushing water, naked and digging down deep for courage that she knew was still there somewhere. 

There was a tickle of a thought somewhere in the back of her skull that was mad at her for wasting so much water, but luckily-- unluckily-- truthfully the rest of her brain, all filled with irrational fear, drowned it out. 

Her heart was so far up in her throat that she was practically choking on it by the time she forced herself, one foot and then the other, into the shower stall and under the stream of water. She turned her back to it the minute she was inside, wiping at the droplets that had landed on her face, on her lips, and taking deep, full breaths just to remind herself that she could. 

Ultimately, she was able to get clean without bursting into tears, but only by the very skin of her teeth. Michelle counted the tiles in the shower to keep herself grounded, she made sure to dip her head just far enough back to get her hair wet without letting the water fall too heavily or too completely on her face. 

She kept the temperature warmer, warmer, hot and got out fast enough that she didn’t have to feel cold water on her skin, and wrapped herself up in a thick, plush robe moment she stepped out and turned the faucet off. 

It was more emotionally draining than any shower should have ever been, and when she used her sleeve to clear a circle of steam from the mirror and look at her own face, she didn’t even look refreshed. 

“Get ahold of yourself,” she reprimanded her own reflection under her breath before abruptly turning and leaving the bathroom. 

Peter was sitting in the middle of the bed, having retrieved his phone from the floor and looking up when she appeared in the doorway. 

“Hey,” he said, and Michelle could see as he took stock of the moment and schooled his face accordingly all in the second and a half she stood there. “I think Happy is making sandwiches if you want one.” 

“Maybe,” she said as she moved to the bed, crawled up across the comforter, and situated herself directly behind him. 

Wordlessly, she wrapped her arms around his middle, chest pressed to his back, and rested her forehead at the top of his spine. Peter’s heart was steady, he breathed slowly for her sake, he placed a hand on top of where her’s was clutched at his sternum. 

“I love you,” she said after they had been there for a moment of true, pure quiet. 

Peter turned his head enough that if she had looked up and opened her eyes she could have observed his profile. 

He said, “I love you too,” and ran a thumb across her knuckles as she pulled herself closer. 

“I think,” her voice stumbled over the words. “I think I need help.”

“Okay.”

“Like, professional help,” she admitted into his back, into the warmth of him, the softness of his shirt. 

“The minute we’re back in the city we’ll find you someone,” Peter promised. “I bet Doctor Prishka knows someone who’d be willing to sign an NDA so you could talk about-- all of this.” 

“Thank you.”

“Do you…” he squeezed her hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t get to enjoy showers anymore. They’re-- difficult,” Michelle said. “And so is my mother.” 

That caught Peter’s attention and she could feel his shoulder blades pull back as he straightened his spine. She didn’t talk about Eloise often, but when she did it was always stilted, tight-lipped, and over quickly, so Peter being the smart guy he was, hadn’t taken long to gather that if Michelle brought either of her parents up of her own volition it was important. 

“I’m gonna turn around now,” he said, and Michelle loosened her grip enough to accommodate his movement until he was sitting facing her with one leg tucked close to his body and one bent at the knee with his foot near her hip. 

She kept holding onto the hem of his shirt with one hand. 

“I called her.”

“Did you explain…?”

“Yeah,” Michelle breathed, watching her own hands as they stretched and pulled at the fabric of Peter’s shirt. His eyes never left her face. “I’m not entirely sure she even believed me. There’s probably a seventy-thirty chance in my favor, to be honest.” 

“That’s…” she could feel his frustration, could feel him watering it down right there in front of her. 

“I don’t know what I expected,” she laughed bitterly. “I think I just-- I got caught up in all of this,” she motioned vaguely with one hand. “With all your people here.” 

Peter frowned. “They’re your people too, Em.” 

Michelle just hummed, not in disagreement necessarily but skeptical nonetheless. Skeptical and confused and, sure, a little bit hopeful. 

Her people too. 

*

Peter did end up putting one of Happy’s sandwiches in front of Michelle, and even though she only ate about a third of it, she was grateful nonetheless. 

Mostly, she was focused on the final readthrough of her story and working up the courage to say this to Peter:

“You can read it, y’know,” she didn’t look up at his face. “You don’t have to, and I’ll understand if it’s too much. But I can feel your curiosity from here, dude and I have no problem with you knowing this stuff.” 

“You think it might be too much?” he asked in a way that told her _he_ did. 

Michelle shrugged. “It’s not everything because the full truth would be-- unprintable,” she explained, blunt but gentle. “It might be the exact version of it you need.” 

“I guess if it’s toned down enough for the rest of the world,” Peter said. “If they can handle it, I can.”

Michelle met his gaze, both of them visibly trepidatious about the prospect of him being privy to the very bones of her demons. 

“They don’t have to share a bed with me,” she responded. “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.” 

Peter contemplated it, and Michelle could see him contemplating it because of the way he wore every passing thought on his face, how everything he felt played out in the expanse of his big brown eyes. 

“I might wait,” he nodded with quiet certainty. “Because I-- I think I’m gonna want to talk to the Doc about it.” 

“Okay,” she smiled at him softly, and then leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. 

It was strange, and it was kind of gratifying, that for once in her life she didn’t have to worry about him. 

The knowledge that Peter Parker was taking care of himself this time made it that much easier to accept his support. There had been a time when they had been so invested in each other that they forgot themselves. 

This didn’t feel like that. This felt better. This felt sustainable. 

“Miz Jones, Mister Parker, it would seem you have guests at the front entrance,” Friday’s voice interrupted them and had the two of them sharing a look of mutual intrigue and concern. 

“Like, friends guests or not-friends guests?” Peter asked, tugging absentmindedly at the web shooters he had taken to wearing under his clothes as he got up and started walking in that direction. Michelle followed close behind him. 

“Misters Leeds and Thompson are here,” Friday explained, and the way her voice could follow them through the corridors would never cease to throw Michelle off her guard. 

“Oh,” Peter dropped the collection of tension from atop his shoulders with a bright sort of surprise. 

Michelle on the other hand, blanched. “Flash is here?” 

“Wait, I’ve got that thing for Ned--” Peter stopped in his tracks and turned around. “I’ll be right there, go ahead and let them in.”

He scurried back down the hall with a skip in his step and Michelle’s stomach churned, her hands started sweating, her mind racing. This wasn’t part of the plan, no one else was supposed to show up, no one else was supposed to get involved until it was all _over--_ they had promised her that. 

It was enough for Michelle that she was participating in this thing out loud and in the open, but the idea of dragging these people, her people, her _family_ into it was more than she could justify to herself. 

She turned on her heel and practically ran down the hall, only speeding up when she entered the lobby and saw Ned and Flash waiting anxiously outside the glass doors. 

“Friday, let them in,” she said and watched as the doors swung open. 

Ned startled, and Flash met her fierce gaze with something that managed to be both apologetic and not at all in his own eyes. 

“MJ!” Ned hurried in, immediately wrapping her up in a hug the minute he was close enough to touch her. She hugged him back, but didn’t take her eyes off of Flash. He at least had the instinct to look down at his feet sheepishly. 

“You guys didn’t tell us you were coming,” Michelle said as Ned pulled away, hands on her shoulders and looking her up and down, taking stock. 

“We were worried,” Ned said. “I mean-- We knew you were back, Peter said so, but-- MJ, I’m so fucking glad you’re alright.” 

Michelle relented to that in a small way, in a very _her_ way. She smiled at Ned softly, warmed by his unabated, forever love and squeezed his wrists gently where he was still holding onto her. 

“It’s good to see you too, man,” she said. “Hey-- uh, Peter went to grab something for you if you wanna go find him…?”

“Oh, I--” he glanced between Michelle and Flash, seemed to gather that something was going on he was not privy to, and decided not to fight it this time around. “Sure thing. Residence?”

Michelle nodded even as Ned was already moving in that direction. “Yeah-- See you in a minute.”

And then Ned was gone and she was able to turn all of her furious energy on Flash Thompson. 

“What are you doing here?” she hissed, striding across the room to stand right up in his face. “You can’t be here-- I don’t-- Flash, this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done--”

“I had to make sure you were okay,” Flash insisted. “Shit, MJ, I knew this whole thing was dangerous but you-- I was so fucking scared.”

“Yes, it is dangerous,” Michelle implored. “Which is why the fact that you’re here right now is idiotic at _best--”_

“Is everything okay in here?” Peter appeared in the opposite doorway from the one Ned had just left through and Michelle took a step back, arms crossed tight over her chest and shoulders caving in. “Flash, I didn’t know you were coming?”

“Yeah, hey, Pete,” Flash offered a small, stiff wave. “Ned gave me a ride.”

“Peter, would you make sure Ned doesn’t go getting lost again?” Michelle asked. “I kinda just left him to his own devices and last time he was here…”

Peter took a long look at her, and Michelle knew he wasn’t fooled by her poor attempt at misdirection. 

“Em, if this-- whatever this is-- is gonna have an affect on the mission…”

“It shouldn’t,” Michelle turned her face to give Flash a stern look. “But who knows now, right Flash? I mean, did you even-- Do you know if anyone saw you?”

“No one was paying attention to me,” Flash implored. “No one knows we’re fucking friends, MJ--”

“You don’t know that! And if you think they haven’t been watching this place--”

“You think I was just going to wait around while you took the brunt of this?” Flash’s voice raised to a truly disbelieving pitch. “They tortured you, right? And you could’ve stopped them at any point by just telling them?”

“Okay, someone’s gonna need to tell me what’s going on,” Peter looked between the two of them suspiciously. 

Flash balked at Michelle, something like tenderness mixed in with the surprise. “You didn’t tell him?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stem a blooming headache. 

“Of course I didn’t, Flash,” she sighed. “The more people that know, the more danger you’re in, which is why you shouldn’t have _come.”_

“Oh,” Peter’s face transitioned quickly from confusion to understanding. “Oh Christ, you’re the source.” 

Flash scratched at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I… Yeah,” he said, and if Michelle didn’t know better she would have thought he looked embarrassed. 

“How-- How-- How did you...?” Peter furrowed his brow, shook his head. “Where did all those documents come from?”

“Well,” Flash chuckled wryly. “Turns out dear old Dad made most of his money through classified military projects. His company helped design the fucking Raft.” 

“When Flash found out, he came to me,” Michelle explained. “And he helped me get my hands on all of that evidence. He’s-- Peter, he’s risking a lot to get this out there and we have to protect him, you understand? We have to.” 

“Hey, yeah,” Peter lifted a placating hand. “Of course we’re going to make sure you’re both safe, but-- Once we have Ross apprehended, I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep this under wraps. Flash, your dad…”

“I kind of accepted the death of that relationship a while ago,” Flash shrugged, not quite as emotionlessly in the face as his posture suggested. “But thanks for looking out.” 

“Okay, okay,” Peter ran a hand through his hair and shut his eyes briefly. 

“Peter…?”

“Sorry, just-- Recalibrating,” he explained, but the restless energy only grew. “I’m staying here.” 

“What?” Michelle asked. 

“As opposed to what?” Flash chimed in. 

“We’re supposed to leave to bring in Ross in less than an hour, right before Michelle’s-- before your guys’ story drops,” Peter explained hurriedly. “But we know how serious Ross’s people are about getting their hands on the both of you, so if you think I’m letting either of you out of my sight until this thing is neutralized…”

Michelle’s heart stuttered at the thought that even after it was over, it wouldn’t be over, that part of her would always be looking over her shoulder for incoming danger, for vengeful monsters. 

“Alright,” she breathed, meeting first Flash’s eye and then Peter’s. “You’re staying here.”

*

Ned, after doing a lap around the residence and returning to find his friends in the middle of planning for a national crisis, took the whole thing pretty well in stride. 

“So, are you guys like… committing treason, then?”

“Probably,” Michelle said flatly. 

“And we’re…?”

“Not talking about that part of it?” Flash chuckled. “Yeah.” 

“Cool.” 

*

Peter saw the team off with what Michelle assumed was an unnecessary string of frantic reminders and then joined the rest of them in the common room. 

They were all pretending like the ceiling wasn’t about to collapse down around their shoulders, with Happy anxiously cooking in the kitchen, Tony anxiously telling him he was doing it wrong, Ned and Peter sitting uncharacteristically quietly on the couch, May and Pepper huddled around the laptop that was going to make it all happen, and Michelle and Morgan on the floor, teaching one Flash Thomspon how to draw a dragon. 

Pepper, with Friday’s assistance, had set up her laptop so that with a single command she would be able to publish Michelle’s story, a Stark Industries-slash-Avengers press release, and send the original copy and all relevant documents to at least a dozen reputable news organizations around the globe. 

All they needed was one phone call and they would have the go ahead. And so they waited. 

“Here, you need to pick a color,” Morgan pushed a plastic bin of colored pencils across the coffee table towards Flash, who looked at her, at the pencils with equal parts awe and dissociated nerves. 

“Oh, uh-- I like green?” Flash dug through the bin and pulled out a forest green pencil, holding it up to Morgan as if for approval. 

The girl nodded. “Green dragons are forest dragons.” 

“Cool,” Flash said in the tone of voice of someone who was unaccustomed to children but was trying nonetheless. 

“MJ used to only sketch with regular pencil,” Morgan continued. “But I pointed out that it was boring so we use colors now.”

“Grab me the orange, kiddo,” Michelle held out a hand and Morgan eagerly dropped a bright orange pencil into it. “Thank you very much.” 

“Your dragon looks badass,” Peter said from where he was craning his neck over her shoulder. 

Michelle turned her head and smirked at him. “I know,” she said. Peter smiled at her, kissed her temple quickly, and then leaned back into the couch once more. 

“MJ,” Flash began quietly, in the sort of tone reserved for a private conversation despite the audience pretending not to listen to every word they said. “I’m, I just--”

“I swear to God if you try to apologize to me right now,” Michelle cut him off decisively. 

“I’m only thinking-- I can’t help but _think,”_ Flash pleaded with her. “How worth it is this? After what they did to you-- and what I did--”

“You did exactly what I asked you to do,” Michelle cut him off. “Which was not to draw attention to yourself, because if they had both of us, you know it would’ve been worse.”

What she didn’t say because of the ten-year-old present, but she knew Flash understood by the look on his face, was that if she had given them his name, if they had tracked him down, they would both probably be dead under mysterious circumstances, bodies left undiscovered. Because if these people knew how to do anything, they knew how to pull off a political assassination, especially when they were disappearing a couple twenty-somethings from Queens instead of major political figures.

“I’m still gonna buy you a drink when this is all over,” Flash said offhandedly, turning back to his drawing. 

“Hear that, guys? Drinks on Flash next weekend,” Michelle grinned at the faux-affronted look gracing Flash’s face. 

The chatter remained quiet, stiff in places with the weight of the day, but they all did a good job of pretending like everything was normal for the next forty-five minutes of waiting, waiting, waiting. 

The sound of a ringtone stopped the whole group of them in their tracks, except for May, who managed to answer her phone within a single ring. 

“Yeah?” she said, a little breathlessly. “Okay-- Yes, got it. Be safe.” 

She hung up the phone and looked at Pepper, looked at Tony and Happy hovering outside the ring of couches, looked at Peter on the edge of his seat. 

She looked at Michelle. 

“It’s time,” May said. “You ready, boss?” 

Suddenly, Michelle was shaking-- jaw and hands and lungs-- because she _wasn’t._ Michelle Jones was not, not, _not_ prepared for this, did not know how to emotionally process it, couldn’t get it through her thick skull that this was her life now, wanted so badly to be eight years old and curled up in her parents’ bed after a nightmare instead of wondering whether or not this moment in history would even register in their--

“MJ?”

It was Morgan, reaching her hand out and wrapping it around Michelle’s own unsteady fingers, that brought her back. It was that brave little girl that reminded her of her own courage. 

Michelle wondered if she would one day have the opportunity to tell her the way she’d saved her life. 

She squeezed her hand. 

“Let’s do it.”

Pepper nodded, typed a few quick commands into her laptop and then paused with a breath of air. She tapped down on one final key, and then--

“Okay,” she said. “We’re live.”

The world went quiet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to everyone that has interacted with this story in some way, thank you dearly and I wish you all the love I have to offer <3


	6. Rarely Pure and Never Simple

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m, like-- vibrating at too high a frequency for-- for anything remotely productive.” 
> 
> Peter hummed an acknowledgment, tilted his chin down to press his nose into her shoulder followed by a chaste kiss. 
> 
> “Peter, he’s in the Compound,” she murmured, letting her eyes fall shut in an admittance of fear that she had been masking with anger and ferocity and moral indignation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the penultimate! 
> 
> i gotta thank jess aka Jsscshvlr aka @i-lovethatforme for helping to assure me that i wasn't going to let you all down with this one and being just so very wonderful <3

_“A select group of the Avengers have been seen accompanying a man onto their jet-- We don’t have confirmation yet, but we believe that this is Secretary Thaddeus Ross--”_

_“The press release from Stark Industries states that this woman-- this reporter, Michelle Jones is her name-- came to them with evidence of abuse within the prison facility that Secretary Ross and the DOD designed specifically to hold enhanced individuals--”_

_“Our people are still studying these documents, these-- I’m being told there are video clips included as well--”_

_“This Jones character-- she’s what, barely out of college and we’re just supposed to believe that she had access to this kind of information? Feels contrived to me--”_

_“Why did she not publish with the paper she was employed under-- The Daily Bugle? She claims that she suspected a mole who tipped off the Secretary but--”_

_“Ross has always toed the line of civil rights when it comes to enhanced people. I’m not surprised at all that we’ve finally caught the guy with his hand in the cookie jar--”_

_“Have the Avengers gone too far with this one? Apprehending one of our nation’s leaders-- bringing Shield into this case before the proper judicial channels--”_

_“The security footage that our organization has been provided with through the work of investigative reporter, Michelle Jones-- we can confirm that this footage includes graphic depictions of experimentation upon enhanced individuals. We will not be airing this footage, but we will show you proof of Ross’s frequent visitations to cells within the facility known colloquially as ‘The Raft’--”_

_“Where’s Shelly Jones now, huh? Drops this thing and disappears off the face of the Earth. Doesn’t she have something to say--”_

Click. 

“Okay, we’re walking away from this for a minute,” Peter turned off the television and took Michelle’s hand to pull her off the couch. 

“What more do they think I have to say?” she blustered. “I wrote twenty-five thousand fucking words about it, seriously, what do they want?” 

“I thought we agreed watching conservative commentary shows wasn’t gonna happen.” 

Michelle snorted indignantly, but let herself be pulled off the couch and led to the kitchen. 

“I handed over definitive proof of this guy’s crimes against humanity and the narrative is about whether or not I made up a story about being kidnapped and _tortured?”_ she continued as Peter pressed down on her shoulders until she sat on a stool and put a glass of water in front of her. “What could I possibly have to gain from lying about something like that?”

“A lot of people do believe you,” Peter leaned on the counter across from her. “These guys-- Em, they’re just in it to make controversial television.”

“The literal human experimentation isn’t enough for them?” 

Michelle worked her jaw, bit at the inside of her cheek until she let herself meet Peter’s eyes. He felt for her, felt just as pissed off about the coverage but was clearly trying not to stoke her fire. Graciously, however, he wasn’t being patronizing about it, and even moreso, wasn’t telling her to calm down about it. 

“I know,” she grumbled. “I know exactly why they’re saying what they say, I know all their fucking strategies, I knew this would happen before we even published the thing, I’m just-- fuck, Peter, I need to get out of this place.” 

“I’ll tell you what,” Peter said as he moved back to her side of the counter, leaned into it with his hip and held her face in his hands. “When we get out of here, we never have to come back.”

Michelle couldn’t help it, a ghost of a smile tugged at her cheeks. 

“Well, you do,” she pointed out. 

“Nah, I’m like, only a part-time Avenger anyway,” he shrugged it off. “Spider-Man’s a New Yorker; it’s about time I focused my energy back on the home turf.” 

Michelle turned her face into his palm, partially to press a kiss to his warm skin and partially to cover the growing grin taking over her face. 

She loved him. 

She loved him, and loved him, and loved him-- and it barely even scared her anymore. 

*

After two days of barely leaving Michelle’s side, Peter finally took a beat to see Ned on his way out. 

It gave her a moment to herself, a moment to take stock of how she was feeling, and she wasn’t feeling nearly as free as she thought she would. The story was out there-- the truth-- and that was supposed to lift some of the weight from her shoulders. 

Michelle ought to have felt lighter, right? That’s what they always told you, that talking about the things that frightened you made them less scary, but she felt just as on edge as she had in the days leading up to the release, if not more. 

Of course, the problem with Michelle, which she knew was a problem but had no ability to solve, was that Thaddeus Ross was in the Compound. 

For this period of time, while Ross was being questioned and they were still trying to track down and apprehend the rest of his conspirators, Michelle was also stuck at the Compound. She wanted to go home, to her own apartment with her own bed and the comfort of a time before it all tipped sideways. 

Then again, in a classic case of trauma induced contradiction, she was afraid to leave.

It was a contradiction full of logic, which made it the very worst kind of contradiction to be living. 

She tried not to watch the news, she really did, but sometimes it felt like they were being given more information than she was regarding the whole situation. So she turned it back on, stayed long enough to get well and truly put down, shut it off, got restless again, and repeated. 

Michelle was frustrated. Michelle was wound up. Michelle was losing her mind because steps were being taken forward every moment of every day to take down the man who was responsible not just for her own snapping sanity but the abuse of dozens of innocents. 

Steps were being taken and she wasn’t allowed to know what they were. 

Michelle didn’t take too kindly to being told what she was and was not allowed to know, which was how she found herself striding into the conference room that anyone working on the case was using as an office. 

Natasha was there, along with a couple of Shield agents, and they all stopped what they were doing when Michelle appeared in the doorway. They knew who she was, because of course they knew who she was, and she instinctively crossed her arms over her chest as a barrier between them. 

“Hey, Michelle,” Natasha said levelly, pulling Michelle’s focus back to her and away from the strangers in the room. 

“I want an update,” Michelle demanded. 

“Michelle--”

“In what universe is it helpful to keep me in the dark?” she cut Natasha off with bubbling over anxiety. “I deserve to know-- I have _earned_ knowing what’s going on and-- and on top of that, I want to see him.” 

Natasha was reading her, Michelle could feel the way she was being blatantly read right up until she turned to her Shield companions and said:

“Give us a minute.”

They obediently stepped past Michelle and out of the room, shutting the door behind them, and all the while Michelle was still breathing heavily, still holding her stiff, defensive posture. 

“You don’t want to see him,” Natasha leaned back against the table casually. 

“Don’t tell me what I want.” 

“I think I will, actually. If only because you’re obviously not thinking clearly today,” she responded frankly but not unkindly. 

“He-- I can’t be in the same fucking Compound as the guy and just pretend he’s not here,” Michelle snapped. “I need to see him.”

“What you need is for this case, this indictment, to be one-hundred percent irreproachable,” Natasha said sternly. “Which I can promise you won’t happen if we let a journalist-- no less one of this man’s victims-- in a room with him to go ham.” 

Michelle bristled. “I can handle myself.” 

“I know,” Natasha said. “But this isn’t about you--”

“Come on--”

“It’s about protocol,” Natasha pressed through Michelle’s argument. “And loopholes, and getting off on technicalities. Is that an option for you? Ross getting off on a technicality?” 

“Please don’t patronize me,” Michelle asked of her, the bite fading from her words bit by bit. 

“I’m not. I’m fully aware of how intelligent you are,” Natasha said. “Which is how I know that you know I’m right.” 

Now, Michelle was a big believer in complexity and grey area, at her current point in life more so than ever before even, but she had to accept a certain black-and-white nature of Natasha’s point. Her posture softened, coming down from her attack stance. 

“Yeah,” she exhaled as she ran a palm over her tired features. 

“We’re on your side, Jones,” Natasha said, more imploringly than Michelle had ever heard. “We’re going to win this for you.” 

*

That night, Michelle laid awake, watching the ceiling fan turn lazily above her. 

She counted the floors between her and the man who had led the charge to give her chronically shaky hands, counted the corridors, counted the number of security measures keeping him in place again and again and again. 

Michelle was safe, this she knew for sure, but she couldn’t seem to convince the rest of her body of this truth. The way the thought of him made her feel sick to her stomach complicated things, and the way she still wanted to stride into the room where he was being held despite this complicated it even more. 

She let out a particularly unsteady breath and Peter, who she knew hadn’t been sleeping either, rolled over to face her. He situated himself, lifted a hand and pressed it, steady but gentle into her stomach, smoothing across her sleep shirt to run a thumb across her waist, the bottom of her ribs. 

“You wanna talk about it?” he asked, pillowing his head in his free arm. 

Michelle tangled her fingers with his where he was holding her, pulling him tighter against the ache of healing bone and muscle. 

“No,” she responded. “I’m, like-- vibrating at too high a frequency for-- for anything remotely productive.” 

Peter hummed an acknowledgment, tilted his chin down to press his nose into her shoulder followed by a chaste kiss. 

“Peter, he’s in the Compound,” she murmured, letting her eyes fall shut in an admittance of fear that she had been masking with anger and ferocity and moral indignation. 

He propped himself up on his elbow so he could more easily look at her entire face, and Michelle appreciated the way he didn’t try to tell her it would be okay, that he would protect her, that no one was going to hurt her. She appreciated the way he knew that that wasn’t her immediate concern, that it was just the final straw breaking her back and her stability and any sort of manufactured calm she could draw upon. 

“I’ve got an idea,” he said instead. “Do you trust me?”

“With yourself or with me?” Michelle responded, just to earn the smirk she knew would grace his stupid lips. 

“With you,” he said, squeezing the hand still clutched in hers. 

Her gaze dropped down to the angle of his collarbone and drifted back up to his bright eyes-- brighter than the moon. 

“Yeah,” she promised. “I do.” 

“Perfect,” he grinned, rolling away from her and out of bed. “Come on, then.” 

Michelle’s brow furrowed and she sat up as she watched Peter pull on a shirt and a pair of sweatpants over his boxers. 

“You’re going somewhere?” she asked. 

“Neither of us are going to be able to sleep like this,” Peter shrugged. 

“Okay, but…”

“Has Natasha taught you how to neutralize a spider guy yet?” He picked up Michelle’s sneakers from where they sat by the door, a playfully challenging look in his eyes. 

A startled laugh erupted from Michelle’s tired body. “Not yet.” 

“Well, lace up then, Jones,” he tossed her shoes onto the bed. “We’ve got work to do.” 

*

“How are you not even breaking a sweat,” Michelle let her hands fall to her knees as she caught her breath. 

As it turned out, sparring with your superhuman boyfriend when you were both exhausted and didn’t know what you were doing was a bit of a workout. 

“Stamina, baby,” Peter grinned at her even as she scrunched up her face. 

“Gross, Parker.” 

“Come on, let’s try it a few more times,” he offered a hand to her and pulled her back onto the mat. 

“Is this retribution for every time I’ve made fun of your little workout routines?” Michelle asked, even as she got right back into the defensive position Natasha had taught her mere days earlier. 

“ _Little workout routines,_ ” Peter made a face at her, mock-offended. “How d’you think I get like this?” he motioned to himself in full with a flourish of his arms. 

“Not a scientist, but-- just by looking at you-- it would seem radioactive spider venom stunts growth,” she teased, grinning a true and genuine smile as Peter tossed his head back in a full-bodied laugh. 

“Alright then, Jones,” he met her gaze across the mat, gave her a once over. “Come kick my ass.” 

She didn’t quite kick his ass, because even going easy on her Peter was still unbelievably quick, but they ran the defensive maneuver again and again and again until Michelle’s muscles felt loose and her head had stopped buzzing. 

Of course, by the time that happened, the sun was beginning to rise and a new day was upon them. Peter wordlessly grabbed two yoga mats from a bin along the wall and tossed one to Michelle with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. 

“Was this all one big ploy to try and teach me calming breathing techniques?” she asked from child’s pose, eyes closed and feeling maddeningly relaxed-- the bastard. 

Peter snorted. “In the interest of avoiding certain _lying boyfriend_ accusations,” he said. “I plead the fifth.” 

Michelle didn’t have the chance to respond, because both of them sat up abruptly at the sound of the door opening. She hated the way it made her heart race, that echoing click of a heavy lock, but she had no reason to worry. Of course she didn’t. 

“Mo?”

“Hey,” Morgan said, clinging to the door so it wouldn’t swing shut behind her. 

“What’s up?” Michelle asked, convinced for a moment that Morgan had had another nightmare.

“Dad’s looking for you guys,” is what she said instead. “He sent me to come get you.”

“Does he need us right now or do you think he could wait a minute?” Michelle asked. 

Morgan thought about it and then shrugged. “He didn’t say.” 

“Come do yoga with us then,” Michelle hopped up and grabbed a spare mat out of the bin, rolling it out right beside hers. “Pete’s teaching me.” 

“You do yoga?” Morgan squinted at Peter in a way that made Michelle hold back a laugh. 

“What is with the women in this family and doubting my athletic prowess?” Peter grumbled, unbothered, but egging on the casual banter that had been missing from said women for far too long. 

“ _Prowess,”_ Michelle rolled her eyes at Morgan who actually _giggled_ and brought the sun higher in the sky. 

And then Morgan obediently hopped onto her mat and the three of them worked through increasingly ridiculous poses, falling flat on their asses and laughing and talking Peter into doing a headstand for them only to tip him over and force him into a forward roll. 

By the end of it, Michelle was exhausted with having pulled an all-nighter, and she knew that Peter was as well, but they shared a smile of mutual disbelief that they made it through the night and all the way into a new, sunny day. 

*

Morgan led them back up to the kitchen when they were finished with their impromptu, and somewhat disjointed, yoga lesson. 

A thin sheen of sweat was cooling on Michelle’s skin and she tugged at her limp ponytail as Morgan ran over to Tony, talking a mile a minute to tell him about her little yoga excursion, but Michelle was distracted, because right there in the middle of the kitchen, holding a mug with a little tea bag poking out, was none other than--

“Doctor Banner?” Peter spoke up, continuing forward even as Michelle stopped in her tracks. “I didn’t know you were stopping by.”

“That’s because he didn’t bother to tell anyone,” Tony said with a fond exasperation as he lifted his daughter to sit her up on the counter. 

“It’s good to see you, Peter,” Bruce said, ignoring Tony’s jab. “And you must be Michelle-- I’m--”

“Bruce Banner,” Michelle blurted before she could stop herself. She almost wanted to laugh at the way he had assumed she might not know who he was. 

Bruce lifted a hand as if he was going to offer to shake hers, and then second guessed himself and tucked both into his pockets. 

“Yes,” he said, perhaps a little caught off guard by the way she couldn’t stop staring at him. “That’s-- me.” 

“He wanted to meet you,” Tony said. “The woman who single handedly brought down Thaddeus Ross.” 

Peter, who had been sipping a glass of water by the sink and watching them with a vague confusion seemed to suddenly put the pieces together, but Michelle wasn’t looking at him. She was too busy meeting Bruce Banner. 

She knew this man, she knew all of them with a painful sort of intimacy, and seeing him standing healthy and alive in front of her was putting a strain on her heart that she hadn’t expected. 

Maybe she was just as caught off guard by him as he was by her. 

“It’s an honor to meet you,” she said, but Bruce shook his head with a wry grin, gaze dropping to the floor momentarily. “No, I’m serious,” she insisted. 

“I’m-- It’s an honor to meet _you_ , Michelle.”

“Doctor--”

“You-- I mean, you’ve been deep in their records,” Bruce smiled self-deprecatingly. “I know you’ve seen my name in there.” 

Michelle had seen more than his name in there, but something about the way Bruce crossed his arms, hunched in on himself ever so slightly told her that he already knew that. 

“Yeah,” she confirmed, actively keeping the sympathy off of her face and hoping the lack of an emotional response would be better for him than a pitying one. She knew it was what she would have preferred, but who was she to assume she had anything in common with the literal _Doctor Bruce Banner_ that she had written essay after essay about at Midtown? 

“You didn’t include any of it,” Bruce continued. “In your story, you-- You kept me out of it entirely.” 

Michelle could feel both Tony and Peter in the room with them, all that unbridled curiosity too much to fully ignore, but she kept her focus on Bruce nonetheless as she explained:

“I figured you’d had enough unwanted media attention to last a couple of lifetimes, Doctor Banner.” 

It was overwhelming, the look of unadulterated gratitude on top of Bruce’s shuffling feet, as if he was embarrassed by his own expression of vulnerability. Michelle knew the feeling. 

“I… I’ve been trying to figure out how to thank you for this,” he said and then breathed, exhaled. “This case is going to go to court-- and soon, if I had to guess.”

He looked to Tony, who nodded once. 

“So,” Bruce continued. “If my testimony will help put him away, then I would be honored to stand by your side and give it, Miz Jones.” 

Tony pushed himself up from where he was leaning to be standing fully upright, a look like worry, like indignation, like disbelief on this face. 

“Bruce--”

“No, listen to me,” he lifted a hand towards Tony to stop him in his tracks. “I have been running away from this man since-- I mean, since the two of you were in grade school,” he chuckled with a motion to Michelle and Peter. “I think it’s about time that I stopped running, don’t you?”

Michelle shifted on her feet, off center and flailing for a grip on something solid. 

“Doctor Banner,” she spoke slowly, because she needed the extra time to collect her thoughts. “I would never ask you to…”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Bruce smiled at her gently. “Which is why I’m not just offering, I’m-- insisting.” 

Even as he said it, he didn’t sound entirely sure in his decision, but Michelle wasn’t about to call him out on that. Not when he knew even better than her how important it was that Thaddeus Ross never be allowed to roam free in the world ever again. 

“Thank you,” Michelle said with all the simplicity of sincere recognition of a mutual cause. 

Bruce shook his head again, not accepting it. “If you’re who we’re leaving the world to,” he said. “I dunno-- Maybe there’s reason for a little bit of hope, yet, huh?”

“Hear, hear,” Tony lifted his mug. 

“Hear, hear!” Morgan mimicked her father. 

Peter grinned at her from across the room with something like pride. 

Something in Michelle shifted. She wasn’t sure yet what it was. 

*

“Bruce Banner is in the Compound,” Michelle said from the open doorway where they’d been putting up Flash for the past few days. 

He spun around in his desk chair to level her with a flabbergasted look. 

“ _Bruce Banner?”_ he gaped. 

“I can introduce you,” Michelle said with a smug shrug of her shoulders as she crossed the room to sit on the edge of his bed. “He’s kind of a huge fan of mine.” 

“You’re insufferable,” Flash deadpanned.

“Then suffer,” she smirked, earning a genuine snort of laughter in return. She tucked her hands into her lap and looked around the room. “How are you liking the digs?”

“Listen,” Flash said. “I grew up rich as fuck, but this is on some other level.” 

“Yeah,” Michelle chuckled. 

“It’s a fucking Smart House,” Flash whispered mock-conspiratorially, looking up at the ceiling. “I just keep waiting for it to kill me via-- washing machine or something.”

Flash’s phone cut into their laughter after that, vibrating across the desk as it lit up with the contact information for _Mother._ Without hesitation, Flash reached out and ignored the call, flipping the phone face down on his desk definitively. 

“Have you talked to her?” Michelle asked, knowing it was perhaps too personal or that he wouldn’t want to discuss it, but also figuring that if they couldn’t talk about these things with each other, then who could they? 

Well. Peter, probably, for the both of them, but still. 

“Last night,” Flash sighed. “She called when they brought my dad into custody.” 

“I’m sorry.”

Flash furrowed his brow. “For what?” he asked. “What you’ve done is gonna save lives, MJ.” 

“What I’ve done has torn your family apart in the process,” she conceded in response. 

“Christ,” Flash snorted. “I swear to God if you ever blame yourself for my familial dysfunction again I’ll tell Parker you used to memorize his class schedule at Midtown.”

“You wouldn’t,” Michelle squinted at him. 

“Try me.”

“Getting drunk with you was a mistake,” she said flatly. “I’m never having a conversation with you when there’s so much as a bottle of wine in the fridge ever again.” 

Flash laughed, and Michelle’s mouth flicked up into a small grin. Nothing about her life made sense these days, but a friendship with Flash Thompson was probably always inevitable. There was too much unspoken understanding between the two of them-- kids from families that didn’t suit them, didn’t want them, didn’t acknowledge them. 

Kids with pain that they covered up with something else-- sarcasm or cruelty or rough, unrefined senses of humor. They were stuck together now, at the end of all this they would always be tethered to one another, but maybe in a way they had been from the start. 

“Do you really think I could meet Bruce Banner while he’s here?” Flash asked more sincerely. 

“Yeah, of course,” Michelle said. “Nerd.”

*

Later that day, after Michelle had accidentally fallen asleep in an armchair with a book in her lap and woken up with a crick in her neck and a disoriented perception of what time it was, Pepper tracked her down. 

Apparently, the _let her story speak for itself_ plan was not satisfying the world at large, and if they wanted news outlets to start talking about Ross, about what he was being tried for, about literally anything other than _who is Michelle Jones and what the fuck does she know?_ then Michelle was going to need to speak to them directly. 

She was going to have to give them something of an answer. 

“We can put together a written statement,” Pepper said. “Just release that and go from there.”

“The story was a written statement,” Michelle sighed. “That’s not what they’re gunning for, right? They want to see my face for themselves?”

Pepper tilted her head sympathetically. “Yes,” she confirmed what Michelle already knew. “They ideally want a full press conference, a chance to ask questions. But if you ask me, I have half a mind not to give it to them.” 

Michelle smirked at that, the little hints of unprofessionalism that only those closest to Pepper Potts got the honor of witnessing. 

“What will the questions look like?” she asked, already resigning herself to the fact that this was happening, even if Pepper wasn’t sold. 

Maybe talking directly to her fellow journalists was the right move, maybe they would see themselves in her, maybe they would understand. 

“We can ban any questions about your personal life. Anything about your family, Peter, that sort of thing can be off limits,” Pepper assured her. “But your experience as a journalist, how you got your hands on this story, everything in that realm will be on the table. It has to be, or they will probably think you’re hiding something.” 

“Okay,” Michelle clasped her hands in her lap, looked at her wrists that were no longer bandaged white but would always carry the scars of captivity. “Can we practice? Um-- Will you help me, just-- know what to expect?”

Pepper placed a strong hand over both of Michelle’s and squeezed. 

“I’ll be there the whole time.” 

*

The next two days were spent putting Michelle through press conference boot camp. 

Pepper ran the show, coming up with questions and helping Michelle figure out just how much she wanted to offer to the press. They started one-on-one, discussing phrasing for hypothetical answers and certain legal hurdles of what she needed to avoid bringing up, and then eventually started practicing with larger groups. 

Peter and Flash, Tony and Pepper, May and Happy, and even sometimes an Avenger or two would sit facing Michelle in the blocked-off press room and throw question after question at her in a dress rehearsal fashion. 

“Fuck you,” she would say, when she started to get overwhelmed. “Fuck you,” she would laugh, when Peter asked her to rank every Lord of the Rings movie from best to worst. “Fuck you,” she would snap, when Tony suggested she take a break. 

She did still get overwhelmed and they did still take breaks and she most certainly ranked all of the Lord of the Rings movies to the collective amusement and chagrin of everyone in the room, but most of all she could feel her confidence building. 

*

Over the course of the days following Michelle’s story stepping into the world, she made a habit of checking Peter’s phone whenever he left it lying somewhere. She assumed he knew that she was doing it, and she assumed he knew why, but neither of them discussed why she needed to be alone in those moments. 

Her mother had that phone number. It was the number that Michelle had called her from and it was the number that would still be in her call history, but still, she didn’t reach out. 

Eloise Watson was a proud woman and Michelle knew this, knew that some of her stubborn nature was a direct result of the house she’d been raised in, but there was a part of Michelle’s heart that held out hope for a call from home. 

It wasn’t coming, because Eloise was stubborn (like her daughter) and she was prideful (like her own mother) and she was, if Michelle had to guess, deeply humiliated by the way people on the news were talking about her kid. 

And so was the way of things. 

The issue was, Michelle thought maybe she understood it now, that urge to forget the past in its entirety, the desire to move forward as a new person and pretend the old one had never existed in the first place. 

Because with as much as she had changed, she wanted her life to change as well. She wanted to keep writing, but she wanted to write about happiness. She wanted to tell stories about little girls with magical powers and bushes of strawberries in their backyards. She wanted to write the happy ending to a happy middle and she wanted to offer something good back to the world that had not just ruined her but also brought her back. 

Michelle wanted to love differently. The new Michelle wanted to be louder about it, primarily-- obvious and vocal and sincere in the ways that had always terrified her. She wanted to meet joy on the street and recognize it. 

She wanted to shake its hand.

And she understood that her parents had their own wants as well when their lives blew up in their faces, when they changed so much that they felt unrecognizable in the mirror. But, perhaps because she knew what their coping had looked like, had felt like first hand, she knew that there had to be a better way. 

Because she didn’t want to forget. Michelle was going to let go and she was going to move on and be so good and full of love that people may not recognize her, but she would not forget where she had come from. Despite it all, she loved who she had been, and the ways she was changing were as much about protecting that girl, that young woman, as it was about anything else. 

She brought out her new armor, with all its holes and vulnerability, for the first time at a press conference. 

“Miz Jones is here today as a journalist just like the rest of you,” Pepper said into the microphone. “Let’s try to have some semblance of respect for her please.” 

And then the horses were off to the races and Michelle’s heart was pounding but her hands were steady and she stopped hiding. 

They asked some of the questions she had prepared for ahead of time, softballs that she swung and hit without too much effort, but the longer she sat there the more complicated it got. 

_“What do you have to say about the theory that the story of your kidnapping is just that-- a story?”_

_“You yourself have admitted that you never actually saw Secretary Ross during your captivity. How can you be so certain he was involved?”_

_“There are discrepancies in the timeline you’ve outlined regarding your time being held. Do you have any explanation for that?”_

_“Why self publish this story rather than going through the paper with which you were employed? Do you think maybe people would be taking you more seriously if you had done so?”_

It was all _what is the truth_ and _we think you’re lying_ and _why should we believe you_ and as her time on that stage was coming to an end she was tired. 

Truly and completely exhausted with this desire for a cut-and-dry story, an obvious bad guy and his obvious motivations rather than the seemingly good man who has done terrible things and the reasons he has that the rest of them would never actually know. 

These were journalists, Michelle thought, they should know by now that nothing was that easy. Maybe they needed a reminder. 

“You know, Oscar Wilde was a complicated guy,” Michelle said to a reporter in the third row, left hand side and to the room as a whole. “But this whole line of questioning keeps reminding me of something that I think he really got right. _Truth is rarely pure and never simple._ When we report the news, we want to try and break it down, simply, so there isn’t any sort of barrier to keep our people informed. But there are complexities that can’t be ignored, right? Discrepancies. _Impurities._

“These are the things that make us human, and they’re the things that make it impossible to be truthful while maintaining any sort of simplicity. I guess-- What I want us to learn from this is how important it is that we hold those in power accountable for the truth of their actions, no matter how complex, no matter how much good they were using to mask the bad. And when they use their power to harm our people? That we take that power away.” 

*

Michelle didn’t watch the news that night. 

She made out with her boyfriend in bed-- slow and lazy and comfortable; with all of their clothes on because she was still retraining her brain that hands on her bare skin weren’t always a threat-- and she fell asleep with the knowledge that she had done right by herself. By others as well, but that had never been in doubt. 

Her self-sacrificing streak had made sure that everyone else had their oxygen masks on before she even touched her own, but that day, on that stage, she’d finally taken a deep breath. Because although she had been waiting-- and waiting, and waiting-- for it all to be over, and although she knew that it wasn’t, maybe there was freedom in the knowledge that it never would be. 

Maybe her liberation was in accepting the ways her life had changed, leaning into that redefinition of self, rather than trying to become something she once was. 

Maybe, against all odds, she would be okay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've got a busy couple of days coming up but you can expect the final chapter wednesday! 
> 
> love you all, thanks for stopping by <3


	7. Moose Tracks (and other rewards)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not gonna see you anymore,” she said, voice breaking. 
> 
> “What?” Michelle gaped at her. “Morgan, of course you will.” 
> 
> “You’re going back to your real life and-- and we weren’t as close of friends back-- back before,” Morgan expressed disjointedly but all too clearly. 
> 
> “You’re part of my real life, kid, no doubt about it,” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I didn’t make that obvious.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you saw me accidentally post this before it was done and then immediately delete it no you didn't <3

The night before Michelle was set to move out of the Compound and back to her place in the city, the whole lot of them had a big, messy, joyful, melancholy family dinner unlike any meal that Michelle had ever experienced. 

There were at least four people in the kitchen trying to take charge at any given time, and the wine was flowing in heavy, frequent pours. Every time Peter sneaked in behind Happy at the stove, he would steal two bites of whatever was cooking and drop one casually into the palm of Michelle’s hand while munching contentedly on the other. 

Friday was playing a chaotic assortment of music from everyone’s individual, personal playlists, which gave the soundtrack to the evening a mismatched, but somehow still cohesive quality with people both aggressively claiming and denying certain songs as their own. 

By the time they were sat around the table, with Peter on Michelle’s right side and Morgan close on her left, she was buzzed on pinot grigio and digging into the odd assortment of dishes before her with fervor. 

She wasn’t thinking about the people in custody just a wing away, or the trial that was about to begin, or the fact that she wasn’t technically on anyone’s payroll anymore and was fielding job offers and book deals and things that she wasn’t sure she wanted. 

Instead, Michelle was thinking about these people-- messy and joyful and melancholy in their own right-- and how deeply she loved them, how deeply loved they made her feel. 

She knew that she was broken, had been before this entire journey had begun, but May Parker’s lilting teasing made her feel whole; Pepper Potts’s unwavering support made her feel whole; Flash Thompson’s blunt honesty made her feel whole; Tony Stark’s fond snark made her feel whole; Peter Parker’s warm skin, his stupid jokes, his bright eyes and weathered hands and big, full laugh made her feel whole. 

Morgan Stark’s unblemished faith in her-- that made her feel whole too. 

Michelle refilled her glass, topping off Peter’s in the same breath, and then cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention. She was just on the verge of drunk, alcohol warm in her belly and loosening the boundaries she kept on herself. 

“I’m gonna make a toast now and no one’s gonna be weird about it,” she said, earning a faint chuckle from the group. 

“Stand up,” Peter pushed at her shoulder with a grin on his face. 

“Absolutely not,” she responded flatly, but lifted her wine glass from her seated position as he rested his cheek in his hand and smiled broadly at her. “I just-- I wanted to say, before I leave in the morning-- I wanted to say thank you. Because I know it’s not over yet, and we’ve got a lot of work still, but it wouldn’t be getting done without all of you. Plus, I wouldn’t be able to get out of this place and back to my life if it wasn’t for all of you,” she laughed. “So. You know, thanks and all that.”

Everyone was only beginning to lift their glasses in a table-wide cheers when Morgan abruptly slid out of her seat and stormed out of the kitchen, down the hall, and towards her room. 

Michelle felt her heart stall as she watched her go, as Tony calling out for her didn’t stop her in her forward motion. Pepper moved to stand up, but Michelle beat her to it. 

“Can I…?” she began hesitantly. “I feel like that was about me.”

Pepper smiled at her gratefully and nodded. Michelle tried to sober up on her short trip to the other end of the residence. She was minimally successful. 

“Hey, Mo?” she tapped gently on the closed door with two knuckles. When there was no response, Michelle continued: “I’m gonna come in now.”

And she did just that, opening the door slowly, peeking her head inside to see Morgan in the corner of her bed, up against the wall with her arms crossed tight over her chest. Michelle may not have given a lot of tantrums when she was Morgan’s age, but she recognized the posture nonetheless. 

“Hey, you,” she said as she closed the door behind her and joined Morgan on the bed, legs curled up underneath her. 

“You should go back to your party,” Morgan grumbled. 

“I’m good here.” 

Morgan sank lower where she was sitting, but didn’t tell Michelle to leave again so she took that as an invitation to stay for the time being. 

“Can you tell me what’s bothering you?” Michelle asked, getting comfortable up against the wall, shoulder pressing gently into Morgan’s. 

Morgan scowled down at her own hands for a moment before shaking her head once, tense and unyielding. Michelle reprimanded herself, because somewhere along the line Morgan had fooled all of them into believing she was old enough to be coping with all of this with any sort of logic. 

Of course she would have trouble verbalizing what was wrong, even Michelle struggled with it some days and she was a professional communicator. So Michelle took a step back, back a handful of weeks to when it had still just been them and a narrow cot and a mutual desperation to survive. 

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” 

Morgan’s head shot up, surprised and no longer scowling. 

“What?” she questioned, sounding all ten of her small, full years. 

“The thing that’s got you feeling some type of way,” Michelle poked gently at Morgan’s shoulder. “Let’s _twenty questions_ it out, yeah?”

Morgan looked at her like she’d finally lost her entire mind, and to be fair, maybe she had lost something on the way to building the new version of herself sitting in that room on that day in that new, new world. Or maybe she was a little bit drunk. 

But then, disbelief and confusion morphed into contemplation and finally understanding. 

“Animal,” Morgan said, as she realized Michelle was giving her a way to talk about it without really having to say all that much. 

“Zoo animal or person animal?”

“Person.”

Michelle had a hunch. She vocalized it. “Is it me?” 

A nod from Morgan, more hesitant this time, still refusing eye contact. 

“Did I hurt you?” Michelle asked quietly, aching with the mere thought of it. 

“No,” Morgan responded, just as quiet. 

“Was it-- Did I say something in my toast?” 

Morgan shrugged and Michelle took a breath, a beat, a moment to consider everything she had said or even simply implied. And then she got it. 

“Do you not want me to leave?” 

Morgan didn’t respond, instead pulling her knees up and burying her face in the pillow in her lap. 

“Hey, can I tell you something?” Michelle pinched at the fabric of Morgan’s sleeve and tugged gently to get her to pay attention. Morgan turned her head just enough to peek at Michelle out of the corner of her eye. “I’m nervous too.” 

Skepticism colored Morgan’s face, but she sat up a little straighter. 

“Why?” she asked. 

Michelle shrugged. “I haven’t lived on my own for a while now. It’s like doing it for the first time all over again, and doing anything for the first time is a little scary.” 

“Then why do you have to do it at all?” Morgan questioned more fiercely. “We have space here. You don’t _have_ to go anywhere.” 

“Well,” Michelle considered it, made sure her wording wouldn’t sound patronizing to a girl who understood this stuff better than most adults. “I don’t want to be scared forever. And for that to happen-- I’ve-- I think I’ve gotta face it.” 

That seemed to resonate with Morgan, but she still wasn’t done fighting. 

“I’m not gonna see you anymore,” she said, voice breaking. 

“What?” Michelle gaped at her. “Morgan, of course you will.” 

“You’re going back to your real life and-- and we weren’t as close of friends back-- back before,” Morgan expressed disjointedly but all too clearly. 

“You’re part of my real life, kid, no doubt about it,” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I didn’t make that obvious.” 

“You won’t just disappear once you leave?” 

“No way,” Michelle shook her head. “You guys will be back in the city soon enough, right? So you can start school up again in January? And I’m gonna be around so much you and your folks are gonna get sick of me.” 

Something like a smile pulled hesitantly at Morgan’s lips. 

“We’ll find something regular if you want,” Michelle continued. “A once a week or-- or every other week thing that you can hold me accountable to, yeah?” 

“Fridays,” Morgan said, immediately decisive. “After I finish school and you leave work.” 

Michelle pretended momentarily to contemplate it, despite knowing she would go along with nearly anything that this little girl asked of her, even now, even when the darkness was receding from both of their eyes. 

“Deal,” she finally said, offering a hand out for Morgan to shake. 

“Deal,” Morgan repeated, returning said shake with the enthusiasm of a kid who had just gotten what she wanted. 

When they sat back down at the dinner table, no one acknowledged their brief disappearance out loud, but Tony loaded another helping of pasta onto Michelle’s plate and Peter placed a hand on her knee without even breaking his conversation with Natasha. 

Messy, joyful, and melancholy. Who would’ve thought? 

*

Michelle moved back into her apartment the same week that the trial of Thaddeus Ross began. 

Someone had cleaned up the place in her absence-- most likely May Parker had something to do with that little fact-- and the curtains were slung open to let in bright blue daylight. 

In getting settled, she realized that the transition may be a bit more overwhelming than she had originally thought. Going outside was difficult, because she had gotten so accustomed to equating indoors with safety during her time at the Compound, and going outdoors after the sun had set was even worse for obvious reasons. 

Even still, spending all of her time alone was going to have a negative affect on her waxing and waning mental health, as she discovered on her first night alone, spent buying two extra deadbolts to install on her front door and sturdier locks for her windows than the ones that were already there. 

It wasn’t until she finished that task that she was able to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.

So by the time the first day of the trial rolled around, she was already tired of it. 

Ultimately, she had to stay in the courthouse but couldn’t enter the room itself until it was time for her to take the stand, so she spent weeks reading books and job hunting online before she became relevant to the questioning at hand. 

During this time, she was constantly on edge and barely productive, but she did get the name and number of an Avengers-approved therapist willing to take her insurance and set up her first appointment for soon after the trial could be expected to end and the public eye averted itself from her every move. 

Even still, the wait was long and the wait was pressurized beyond what her bones should have been able to withstand. 

But withstand it she did, and continue she would. 

*

On the day of her testimony, Michelle couldn’t look Ross in the eye, couldn’t speak directly to him, couldn’t find the courage to stand up to his face. 

She found herself regretting it almost immediately, and found herself frustration crying about it at Peter’s apartment later that night-- suit jacket discarded and shoes kicked off, tying her hair up into a loose ponytail and wrinkling her nice dress shirt as she explained what a _coward_ she had been through a mucus-clogged throat. 

“God, I don’t want to argue with you while you’re crying,” Peter said that night. “But you’re so wrong-- you’re-- you’ve never been this wrong in your life because you’re just about the bravest person I’ve ever met, Michelle.” 

“I couldn’t even _look at him,”_ she pushed back. “Just knowing he was in the room was-- I was terrified, Peter.”

“But you still did what you had to do!” Peter exclaimed with a disbelieving laugh. “You’re the reason that fucker is getting what he deserves and if that isn’t courageous then go ahead and fuck me with a rusty crowbar.” 

Michelle snorted into her hand, snotty and tearful and surprised by her own reaction as much as she was by Peter’s indignation. The way he grinned at her told her that that had been his goal all along, and God did she love him. 

“I hate you,” she said, tears still streaming but some of the pressure on her chest alleviating. 

“Yeah,” he crossed the small kitchen and kissed her right on the lips. It was kind of gross and kind of messy with all of the tears and residual snot and it was over quickly because of that, but Michelle appreciated it still. 

She wiped at her face with her wrist and twisted the hem of Peter’s t-shirt in her other hand and told him:

“I still regret it,” she said. “I get where you’re coming from, but I still regret not showing him I’m-- I’m not afraid of him.” 

“I know,” Peter wrapped one of her curls around his finger, watching it intently as he unwound it and let it fall to frame her flushed face. This romance on this day was tears and snorting laughter and wrinkled, sweaty dress clothes. 

“I need a shower,” she sniffed as she started to get ahold of her breathing apparatus once more. 

“You can use mine.”

Michelle looked up from where her gaze had been residing on his broad chest to meet his eyes head-on. 

“Do you want to join me?” she asked, earnest more than seductive, but that was kind of the point. 

“Really?” Peter’s brows lifted in surprise. 

“I mean, I don’t think-- I’m probably not ready for any funny business but…” she shrugged. “I kinda really want to wash your hair.” 

His eyes went soft and his smile went wide. “My hair really needs to be washed,” he said. 

“Yeah,” she smiled right back at him, bloodshot eyes and broken heart and all. “Plus you smell.” 

Peter threw his head back in bright laughter and Michelle pushed him towards the bathroom with both hands. 

What she didn’t realize in the moment, but would figure out later, was that there was courage in vulnerability. There was courage in speaking up when speaking made your lungs shake, there was courage in crying in front of the man whom you wanted to believe in your beauty, there was courage in letting him see you naked and real and scarred under streaming, pounding water. 

There was courage in love, and Michelle would get that one day, even if not that day. 

*

Four days later, Thaddeus Ross was found guilty by judge and jury. 

Michelle didn’t cry, and she didn’t cheer either. It felt inevitable and it felt impossible and it felt a little bit like watching someone else’s life because there was no way she had actually won, right? 

Against that man, against the system, against the parts of herself that were still, still, still healing. 

It felt like a fist fight, walking away with a split lip and bruised ego and pointless bragging rights. 

But more than anything, it felt as though she could see past tomorrow again. 

Where she had spent all of this time stepping from one day into the next with uncertainty, with no way to plan for what was to come because what was to come was so very, very out of focus in her mind’s eye, she started being able to have intention once more. 

Michelle could think more clearly about what she _wanted_ , what she _needed,_ what was even possible for her, because she could finally, unbelievably after all of this time, come out of survival mode. 

She started therapy, and subsequently started keeping a journal as a way to process how she was feeling day-to-day. She went in for job interviews and got very good at being able to tell who wanted her for her skills and education rather than her newly acquired name recognition. 

She had sex with her boyfriend, worked up to it slowly and kissed him hard on the mouth when he made her come three times in one night. She looked at her own body in the mirror and saw it for what it was-- alive, healthy, cared for. 

She had regular lunches with Flash Thompson-- sometimes laughing over coffee out in public and sometimes quietly commiserating in her living room with the curtains drawn (her therapist thought she was dealing with a mild case of agoraphobia. They were working on it). 

She and Flash had been friends for long before their worlds turned upside down, but they had something different between them now. A support that existed even when they disagreed, even when they were irritated with each other, even when it was all too much. 

She didn’t visit her mother, but she did send her a lengthy email. She gathered her courage and pushed down her anger and outlined everything that she had ever wanted to explain to Eloise Watson. 

She had yet to receive a response, but that was okay. That wasn’t why she had done it. 

On Friday afternoons, she picked up one Morgan Stark from school and they took the subway to the weekly farmer’s market. They would hold hands in the crowds and talk about their weeks and snack on fresh fruit (strawberries and oranges when the season allowed). 

When they were finished, Michelle would take Morgan back to the Stark family penthouse, where she would join them for dinner. Anytime Peter wasn’t in the middle of a city-wide crisis, he would drop in as well. 

Michelle still struggled to accept all that had happened sometimes, unable to contain all of the good and the bad in one heart, but she was trying, and even on the hard days there was still the sun. The sun and the wind and the people-- her people. 

She ended up taking a job at a small, activism-centric online publication where they let her do and cover and explore pretty much anything that she wanted. She would sometimes appear in videos as an expert source, not on political legal proceedings or torture or captivity, but on civil rights and racial injustice and the things that she had spent years getting educated about. 

By mid-summer, still less than a year after her original capture, the comments on her articles, on her videos, on anything where her byline appeared, were becoming less about what she was known for and more about what she was saying. 

But there was still something she needed to do. 

*

“Oh, this is really good,” Michelle said, dipping her spoon back into the sauce on the stove to take a second taste. 

“Hands out of the honey pot, Jones,” Tony shouldered her out of the way to get back to work. “If you’re not gonna help, you don’t get any tastes until it’s done.” 

Michelle sucked on her spoon and leaned on the counter a few feet away, not helping. 

“Last time I assisted you, you got mad at me,” she pointed out. “Because you’re a control freak.”

“Only about classic pasta dishes,” he pointed the knife he’d been using at her but Michelle shot him a disbelieving look. He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I hate journalists.” 

“You hate journalists that write about you,” Michelle said. “Which I technically can’t do because of, y’know, conflict of interest rules.” 

“Because of our unlikely but heartwarming friendship?” Tony teased. 

“No,” she deadpanned. “Because I hate your guts.” 

Tony laughed and Michelle smirked past the spoon she was tapping against her lips. It was a regular Friday evening for her these days which was irregular in its own way, but she wasn’t complaining about the homemade dinner or the good-smelling kitchen or the all around welcoming warmth of it all. 

Morgan was off getting homework help from Rhodey and Pepper was finishing her work for the night, so it was just Tony and Michelle in the kitchen on this occasion. 

She could feel the question coming from a mile away. 

“You know, Happy told me you had a security question for him recently,” Tony said without looking up from his work. 

Michelle very nearly rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she said without offering anything else up. He was going to have to work a little harder for that. 

Tony shot her a look.

“Listen,” he said. “If this is about the level of security he’s under…”

“It’s not,” she shook her head, dropping her spoon in the sink and pushing herself to sit up on the island. 

“Okay,” Tony responded skeptically, expectantly. Michelle gave it a beat before giving him what he wanted. 

“I wanted to know what protocol was for visitors at that place,” she said. “I know how high his security level is, so I wasn’t sure what I would need to do to get inside.” 

Tony turned the stove off completely and turned around to face her head-on, gaping expression and all. 

“You want to visit Thaddeus Ross in prison,” he said, flat with disbelief. 

“Did you know I’ve never actually had a conversation with the guy?” Michelle asked. 

“This feels like one of those things I should know the proper reaction to, but I seriously do not.” 

“I’m not being self destructive if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said, noting the flash of genuine concern that crossed his face. 

“What’s the logic behind this, though?” Tony asked, not unkindly. “Because I know you’ve justified it to yourself, but Michelle-- are you sure?” 

“I wouldn’t have gone to Happy, knowing you would find out about this, if I wasn’t sure,” Michelle smiled knowingly at him. 

A tip of the head that said _sometimes I forget how smart you are,_ that said _well played,_ that said _proud of you._

“Okay,” Tony said aloud. “What do you need from me?” 

“Clearance,” she replied immediately. “A Shield-issued pass so they’ll let me see him.” 

Tony nodded, already seeming to have a plan to make it happen for her formulating at the back of his brain. 

“We can make that happen.”

“Thank you, Tony,” Michelle said. “Seriously.” 

Tony faltered as he turned the stove back on, redirected his focus back to the food rather than zeroing in on the trials and tribulations of this woman-- his daughter’s personal superhero. He looked like he was trying to force himself to move past the conversation, but at the last moment gave up on that train of thought. 

“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” he looked at her with a rare earnestness. “You don’t have anything to prove.” 

“I need to look him in his face,” Michelle said, simple and clear and lacking some of the spite that was usually present in conversations of this nature. “I need him to know just how entirely he’s lost.” 

Tony absorbed this with care. “Fair enough,” he said. “But I’m gonna drive you and you’re not gonna complain about being able to take care of yourself when I buy you-- I dunno, ice cream or some shit afterwards.”

A boisterous laugh escaped from Michelle’s lungs. “Ice cream?” she grinned. “I’m almost twenty-five, Stark.” 

“What, adults can’t enjoy a nice summertime treat?” Tony faux-glared at her. 

“Alright, fine,” she brushed him off, still laughing. “Deal. You can buy me a fucking popsicle after I have a chat with the human experimentation guy.” 

“I can make it a Maserati,” Tony deadpanned. “Would you rather that? A whole fleet of them?” 

“I already agreed to the ice cream!” she exclaimed indignantly. 

“Yeah, but you were clearly still making fun of me,” Tony said. “The guy going out of his way to get a day pass to the highest security prison in the country.” 

“I would offer to thank you again, but I’ve hit my sincerity quota with you for the day.” 

“You’re the greatest menace in my life,” Tony said, mere seconds before they heard the clattering of someone landing heavily on the balcony and noisily coming in through the sliding glass door. “Second greatest.” 

“Second greatest what?” Peter asked as he pulled his mask off and skipped into the kitchen, grabbing a spoon off the counter and dipping it in the simmering sauce. “Oh, nice.” 

Tony and Michelle looked at each other and then burst out laughing. Peter, aware that he was the butt of the joke but uncaring, just looked on with amusement. 

*

Two weeks later on a Wednesday morning, Tony picked Michelle up from her apartment, set a course with Friday, and got the two of them on the three hour journey to the Shield facility upstate where Thaddeus Ross was being held. 

Peter had spent at least eighty percent of his time during those two weeks trying to convince Michelle that he could come with them, but she knew he had already used up more than his allotted personal time at his lab assistant job with Doctor Octavius and had no intention of being the reason he got fired. Again. 

So it was Michelle Jones and Tony Stark-- both of whom were the snarky one in a buddy movie scenario and whose battling tastes in music and radio had the mood of the car swinging on a wild pendulum between loud angsty and quiet angsty. 

The focus on constantly stealing the playlist back from Tony kept her occupied though (which may have been the point) so she wasn’t actually all that torn up about it. 

“I can come in with you,” Tony said as he parked the car at the visitor’s entrance. “Or I can wait in the lobby. Or we can just-- turn around now and go back, no harm done.” 

Michelle wasn’t sure whether the fondness she was feeling showed on her face as she unbuckled her seatbelt and looked at all his wariness laid out in the open, but it was there nonetheless. 

“Stretch your legs old man,” she said, all put-upon confidence for both of their sakes. “I won’t be long.” 

*

Michelle was pretty sure she blacked out for her entire trip through security, down a series of corridors, and into her seat across from plexiglass panelling and an empty booth. 

“He’ll be right out,” the guard who had let her in said as he took up post by the door. 

“Thanks,” Michelle nodded, tapping her fingers against her thigh and wondering for the first time all day whether or not this was actually the worst idea she had ever had. After all, in all fairness to herself she wasn’t one hundred percent back on her game yet. 

Less than a year ago she was being tortured in a concrete room and begging a couple of US soldiers not to hurt the ten year old in her care, so it would be a miracle if her head was screwed on all the way, but there was still a part of her that knew she had to do this. 

Maybe it was one of those rules she set for herself that her therapist said were her way of maintaining control over the chaos of recovery, this decision she had made, but Michelle really had convinced herself that if she was going to move on, she had to face this. 

She had to face him. 

He looked surprised when he entered the room, unshaven face and prison tracksuit and hands shackled in front of him like a regular criminal. 

Michelle picked up the phone on her side of the partition and watched him expectantly as he did the same. 

“Miss Jones,” he said, smiling faintly and looking at her like Christmas dinner. “They didn’t tell me that it was you I would be getting a visit from this afternoon. And here I was thinking I had the right to turn away those with the intention of harassment.” 

“I’m very persuasive,” she responded, grappling for casual, to keep her breathing even and somehow, beyond understanding, managing it. 

“Yes, well, I’m aware of that,” he looked down at himself with a bitter smirk. “What I’m interested to discover is what on Earth you want to hear me say.” 

Michelle actually laughed at that, loud enough to earn a frown out of the man sitting across from her. She shook her head indignantly. 

“I don’t want to hear you say a single thing,” she said. “Honestly, if you could shut up and listen for five minutes, that’s really all I could ever want.” 

“So, what?” he continued, much to Michelle’s chagrin but not her surprise. “You’re here to gloat, then? Be angry to my face?” 

Michelle considered this briefly, leaned forward on her forearm so her face was closer to the glass between them, close enough to see the exhaustion in his eyes, the defeat in his posture that he was so desperate to cover. 

“You know, I’m not really an angry person,” she said, as though realizing it for the first time herself. “People think that I am, but I’m not. I’m just… I know I have strong opinions and I vocalize them, I speak up for what I believe to be right and I correct myself when I fuck it up, but I’m not angry. I’m just _tired._ I’m tired of men like you and I’m tired of a world that creates them. I’m tired of having to survive the whole mess of it.” 

Michelle cocked her head to the side, taking in the sight of him. He watched her, calculating, and she relished a little bit in the way he didn’t even bother to speak up. 

She had taken his voice from him, and she had no intention of ever giving it back. 

“You have a lot of people in your corner, I’m not fooling myself about that,” Michelle said, feigning offhandedness. “And I have no doubt that there are dozens of plans being made right now to get you your freedom back. But, I just want you to know one thing before I go…”

Eye met. Hand shown. 

“It’s you who has to learn to survive me from now on.” 

*

“So,” she clapped her hands together as she got back into the car. “I’m thinking moose tracks sounds good. How about you?” 

Tony looked at her, looked harder, looked for something that he wasn’t going to find in the steadiness of her hands and the quirk of her lips and the strength of her shoulders. Michelle looked back, and found pride in the lines around his eyes. 

She could recognize that now-- pride of her, for her, about her. 

“Moose tracks sounds great,” he cleared his throat of the emotion still lodged there, not entirely ridding himself of it as he started the car and pulled out of his parking spot. “I’m gonna buy you a whole fuckin’ gallon.” 

Michelle felt younger than she ever had in that moment. Not in a _needed taking care of_ way or a _naive and unaware_ way either, but instead in the ease in her lungs, the freedom of her laugh, the durability of children that no one ever gave them enough credit for. 

They pulled out onto the highway and headed towards home. 

*

On the one year anniversary of her capture, it all came kareening back into her and Michelle couldn’t make herself leave her apartment. 

She pushed her cot-- _bed--_ up against the wall, locked the front door _one, two, three_ times, and then curled up in the corner of her mattress, facing the open bedroom door and breathed. Something had her frozen there in space, unable to move or shower or eat for hours while she fought with her own self consciousness to just act like a fucking human being. 

Her phone buzzed consistently throughout the day with messages from her people. Michelle could see them checking in, watched as their concern grew with her lack of response, but was having to build her ability to communicate up from scratch, brick by brick until at four o’clock in the afternoon she finally picked up. 

“Hey.” 

“Hey, Em,” Peter said. “I’m at your door-- can you let me in?” 

“I, um,” she began shakily before pressing her lips together and breathing out through her nose with a quiet, frustrated sound. She couldn’t stop thinking about the locks on the door-- _one, two, three._

“Okay,” Peter responded with gentle certainty. “I’m gonna come straight to you then-- bedroom window, if that’s alright?”

“Sure,” she said, hanging up and dropping her phone next to her hip again before he could say anything else. 

Michelle knew he wouldn’t take it personally, and sure enough he was on her fire escape, tapping gently at the window less than five minutes later. She crawled off her bed as he waved at her with a nervous quirk of a smile on his stupid, loving face, immediately helping her open it from the outside the moment that she flicked the lock open. 

“I brought Chinese,” he said as he crawled in, closing and locking the window behind him before joining her on the bed with a bag of takeout. 

The smell and the warmth of the carton that Peter handed her reminded Michelle of a hunger deep in her gut, one for food and one for companionship in equal measure. She leaned against the headboard as she ate and Peter sat up against the perpendicular wall. 

And although she could feel herself waking up bit by bit, she was without words to express her gratitude for his presence, instead digging her toes into his thigh and knowing he understood when he squeezed her ankle in return. 

He told her about what he’d been working on at his lab recently while they ate, and Michelle let the enthusiasm in his voice for the things he had accomplished wash over her as she slowly began to chime in with simple questions or comments the longer he was there. 

“Thanks for coming,” she finally said, after the food was put away and an episode of Bob’s Burgers was playing quietly on her laptop on the other end of the bed. 

At some point Peter had scooted up next to her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and hadn’t once tried to make her talk about the day at hand. 

“I wanted to come by earlier, but there was-- listen to this, because it’s a killer scoop, Jones-- there’s this Russian motherfucker running around in Rhino armor.”

Michelle couldn’t stop the disbelieving huff of a laugh that snuck up on her, nor did she really want to with the way it loosened some of the tension in her gut. 

“Excuse me?” she asked. “Rhino armor?”

“Right?” Peter grinned at her, far too delighted with the situation. “Where do they come up with this shit?” 

“To be fair,” she said. “You do swing around on spider webs and we’ve all just accepted that that’s normal when it’s, y’know, decidedly not.” 

“Yeah, but I’m, like, so much cooler,” Peter said flatly. 

Michelle turned her face enough to groan directly into his shoulder and he took the opportunity to smooth her hair down the crown of her head and kiss her where it parted in the middle. She leaned into him, took a moment to breathe. 

“How’re you feeling?” he asked, when she had relaxed in his arms, hand wrapped loosely around the curve of his ribs. 

“Better,” she said. “Sorry for the meltdown.” 

Peter hummed, not fighting back against the apology but not acknowledging it as necessary either. 

“I love you like crazy, Em,” he said as an answer instead. 

“You too,” she breathed into him. “You know, right?” 

“Yeah, I know.” 

*

On Halloween, Michelle Jones went trick-or-treating for the first time since she was a child. 

She even wore a costume because Morgan had decided, in what was truly the peak of her dinosaur phase, that the whole lot of them had to dress up as the cast of Jurassic Park, starring Morgan herself as Rexy. 

Pepper had gotten her one of those ridiculous inflatable dinosaur costumes, and watching her waddle out of her room to show them for the first time was the hardest Michelle had laughed in a good, long time. 

She herself was glad to have been assigned the Laura Dern to Peter’s Sam Neill, and ecstatic at Ned’s take on Jeff Goldblum. Flash was stuck as John Hammond, if only because Morgan had caught on that it was fun to draw attention to Flash’s nerdier tendencies. 

And so the five of them made their way across town to Forest Hills where Peter and Ned knew the best route available for local trick-or-treating. 

Michelle didn’t take her eyes off of Morgan the entire time they were out, and surreptitiously stepped in between her and large groups of rowdy teenagers on more than one occasion. After the third time that happened, Peter took her hand, noticing an anxiety in her that she was managing to hide from everyone else. 

He looked pretty stupid, with the hat and the bandana around his neck, and really if Michelle couldn’t help but grin every time she caught sight of him then she wasn’t to blame. 

The adults were led by the most enthusiastic little T-rex the world had ever seen, and they took turns walking her up to each house while the rest waited out by the street because Michelle was paranoid and maybe the rest of them were a little bit too. 

They got a lot of delighted reactions from the people handing out candy, and it was going very smoothly with no need for the built-in superhero security detail that was Peter until-- 

“You’re Michelle Jones,” the woman gaped at her, looking like she very nearly dropped the bowl of candy in her hands. 

“I… um,” Michelle floundered, but she need not have worried, for Morgan straightened her spine and, from behind the plastic window in her costume, spoke up. 

“Yes she is and she helped a lot of people, so you shouldn’t be rude,” she defended. 

Michelle could feel Peter take a step closer to them from the street, as though preparing to step in if necessary, but the woman’s face shifted from shock to something softer. 

“Yes, of course,” she said to Morgan, and then turned to Michelle. “I’m sorry to-- to bother you at all, it’s only. Well, my son--” she shook her head, but Michelle got the gist from the sudden bucket of emotion being dumped over their collective heads. “I just want to thank you. You really-- Well,” she smiled down at Morgan. “You really did help a lot of people.” 

Michelle swallowed thickly, didn’t even laugh as Morgan’s ridiculous little dinosaur hand slipped into hers. 

“Thank you,” she nodded, trying to maintain her composure. She was pretty well accustomed to being recognized by that point, but this-- this gratitude-- it was new to her. 

It took a beat before the woman sniffed hard and pulled herself out of the moment. 

“Well, here-- Here take a couple, sweetheart,” she dumped a whole handful of candy into Morgan’s bag, and Michelle laughed brightly. “And you too,” she did the same for Michelle, who didn’t have a bag but let the woman drop candy into the palms of her hands. 

Back with the boys, Michelle handed out the gift she had been given-- both the candy and the flush of happiness in her chest. 

“Alright,” Morgan exclaimed. “Onwards!” 

They followed her lead. 

*

When they arrived back at the Tower, Morgan immediately darted across the room to show off her bag of goodies to her parents, leaving Michelle to her own devices. 

The place was done up in the proper Halloween spirit, with spiderwebs hanging in doorways and pumpkins on every surface and holiday themed snacks and drinks lining the counters. 

Michelle got herself a mug of the whiskey-spiked apple cider that May was stirring on the stove and then took a step back and watched, observed the wonder of a world still turning. 

Tony was stealing pieces of candy from Morgan while she wasn’t looking, only to pretend like he had no idea what she was on about when she finally caught him. Pepper was quietly eating the candy that Tony had stolen with an amused expression on her face. 

Flash was bobbing for apples, failing again and again as Wanda slowly moved the apples around in the bucket so that just as he was about to get one it was once again out of his reach. He was getting increasingly peeved, but Wanda looked like she was having the time of her life. 

Peter and Ned were very studiously adjusting the playlist, so she knew something absurd could start playing at any moment. 

And Michelle, warm mug pressed up against her chest, was happy. 

No, she wouldn’t be bobbing for apples anytime soon, and she would be spending the night at Peter’s place because big Halloween crowds made her nervous about being alone, and her startle reaction would probably be eternally heightened but still, still, still she was _happy._

“MJ!” Morgan came running at her from the other side of the room, out of her costume but wearing a big sweatshirt with a jack-o-lantern embroidered on the chest. “I have something for you!”

She came to a bouncing stop right in front of Michelle, hands held stiffly behind her back. 

“Yeah?” Michelle grinned at her. “What’ve you got, kid?” 

“You have to guess,” Morgan rolled her eyes, smiling all the while. 

“Ugh, really?” Michelle made a face. “Maybe I don’t want it if I have to guess.”

“Trust me, you really, really want it.” 

“Hmm,” Michelle, tapped a finger against her chin in mocking contemplation. 

_“MJ!”_

“Alright, alright,” she laughed at the way Morgan was rocking with excess sugar and holiday energy. “Let me think…”

The Monster Mash started playing over the speakers to equal amounts of cheers and groans, the sound of a breaking mug filtered in from the kitchen, Flash threw his hands up in the air, yelling through the apple caught in his teeth, and Michelle cocked her head to the side. 

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” 

_**End.** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello dear friends!
> 
> this fic is the first real multi-chapter story I've finished in quite some time and I'm low key proud of that fact so I can't thank you enough for giving it a chance and sticking around. Thank you all so much for giving me time out of your days and extra special thank you if you ever left a kudos or comment, I appreciate them immensely. 
> 
> as always, thank you for stopping by and feel free to come say hi on tumblr @ premiere-pro
> 
> love you all,  
> prem

**Author's Note:**

> Next Week: Chapter 2, Peter POV, "Call for Help"
> 
> Find me on tumblr @premiere-pro
> 
> Thank you for reading <3 If you wanna let me know what you think that would be cool


End file.
